Troubleshoot your offline-enabled applications in a browser
This article describes how mobile offline-enabled applications developers can use their desktop browser to troubleshoot offline applications.
Starting with Pega 8.1, you can run your offline-enabled application in your desktop browser without any additional configuration or browser plugins - it is all built in the Pega platform. It is recommended for you to use it for debugging and troubleshooting purposes of your offline application. This is not end user product, but a tool that is meant to speed up your daily development. Keep in mind that troubleshooting offline applications in a browser will NOT substitute offline applications testing on the real mobile devices running on iOS or Android.
Following browsers are supported:
- Chrome
- Firefox
- Safari
- Microsoft Edge
- Internet Explorer
Setup and run troubleshooting for offline enabled application
- In the User Access Group assigned to your application:
- Check "Enable offline troubleshooting with a browser" setting on Advanced tab. "Enable offline support" must be checked as well:
- To enable Tracer, add application Administrator role on Definition tab:
- Check "Enable offline troubleshooting with a browser" setting on Advanced tab. "Enable offline support" must be checked as well:
- Log in to the application as a user with one of the supported browsers.
See: troubleshooting-offline-enabled-applications for more details on how to set it up and configuring-offline-capability to learn how to configure offline capability for Pega mobile application.
Trace offline application
Use Tracer tool to troubleshoot offline packaging during login process and when the application is running. The tracer is started automatically when logging in.
You can test and debug activities, data transforms, decision rules, parse rules, and processes. You can select which rulesets, rules, and events to trace; set breakpoints and watch variables; trace reference properties; and add custom events to the Tracer output.
Utilize your browser web-inspector
Web inspector is a powerful tool that can be utilized in debugging the offline application in multiple ways. You can:
- Troubleshoot offline client scripts in a desktop browser and don't have to resort to mobile client debugging tools. Note that there are no web-login logic and scripts being executed and for now only basic authentication is supported.
- See and intercept synchronization network requests and responses, which is very useful on environments where you cannot use proxy tools like Fiddler or Charles Proxy. Note that offline-synchronization is being run on a main thread, which may interfere with application UI responsiveness.
- Simulate a mobile viewport by switching to it from responsive viewport mode or simply resize browser window.
- Change browser user agent to iPhone, iPad or Android device, to get synchronization UI packaged for specific device (it is different for phone or tablet).
- View whole Web SQL database, including all synchronized data and large data pages. Database is not encrypted.