Meet the new DigitalPulse Debugger

When I started at Omni­ture nearly five years ago, one of the first basic tools I got to know was the JavaScript Debugger—you know, that book­marklet you install among your browser book­marks so that you can quickly and eas­ily see exactly what is being cap­tured in Site­Cat­a­lyst any web page. Over the years, I have moved on to more advanced (and com­plex) debug­ging tools, such as packet mon­i­tors and Google Chrome’s devel­oper con­sole. But when I just need to see the vari­ables and val­ues that a page is pass­ing into Site­Cat­a­lyst, I still click the lit­tle entry in my book­mark toolbar.

I am pleased to share with you the lat­est ver­sion of this nifty lit­tle util­ity: the Dig­i­talPulse Debug­ger. We’ve given it the name “Dig­i­talPulse Debug­ger” because it fits in nicely with Adobe Dig­i­talPulse, our implementation/site audit­ing prod­uct which will auto­mat­i­cally crawl your site and detect places where Site­Cat­a­lyst and/or Test&Target code has not been placed, or where it may have been placed with errors of var­i­ous kinds (vari­ables receiv­ing the wrong val­ues, vari­ables that are too long, image requests that are too long, etc.). It seemed like a nat­ural fit. We’ve also changed the loca­tion of the Debug­ger, which does mean that you’ll need to update your book­marklets. We did this for a few rea­sons, but most impor­tantly the new loca­tion allows the Dig­i­talPulse team to add amaz­ing new fea­tures much more quickly. We think you’ll agree that it’s worth updat­ing your book­marklets for that.

So, how do you install the Dig­i­talPulse Debug­ger? If you don’t already have the JavaScript Debug­ger installed, just cre­ate a sim­ple book­mark or favorite in your browser of choice (we’ve tested in IE, Fire­fox, Safari, and—your developer’s favorite—Chrome). Then, replace the URL of the book­mark with the fol­low­ing code (and make sure you get all of the code!):

javascript:void(window.open(%22%22,%22dp_debugger%22,%22width=600,height=600,location=0,menubar=0,status=1,toolbar=0,resizable=1,scrollbars=1%22).document.write(%22%3Cscript%20language=\%22JavaScript\%22%20id=dbg%20src=\%22https://www.adobetag.com/d1/digitalpulsedebugger/live/DPD.js\%22%3E%3C/%22+%22script%3E%22));

If you do have the Debug­ger already, just replace the URL with the code above. (You can also down­load the Debug­ger and addi­tional infor­ma­tion from Knowl­edge Base ID 534.)

Then just go to any page on your site that has been tagged Adobe Online Mar­ket­ing Suite code and click the book­mark. You should see a small pop-up win­dow look­ing some­thing like this:

You’ll notice that the Dig­i­talPulse Debug­ger still does every­thing you have come to expect from the JavaScript Debug­ger, but now offers some help­ful new features:

• Reports on Test&Target, Rec­om­men­da­tions, and Sur­vey in addi­tion to Site­Cat­a­lyst data collection
• Pro­vides the total length of the Site­Cat­a­lyst request on the page
• Shows the “friendly names” for image request ele­ments (e.g. “eVar7” instead of “v7,” and “Cur­rent URL” instead of “g”)
• Gives addi­tional request infor­ma­tion, such as whether the the imple­men­ta­tion uses first-party cookies
• Allows you to change and save set­tings based on the prod­ucts and fea­tures you wish to use

One impor­tant thing to note is that, due to a change in data col­lec­tion code begin­ning with H.21, the old ver­sion of the Debug­ger may not cor­rectly decode multi-byte char­ac­ters in vari­able val­ues if your site is using this (or a newer) code ver­sion. The new Dig­i­talPulse Debug­ger does dis­play these vari­able val­ues cor­rectly for inter­na­tional char­ac­ter sets, so you can get a clearer sense of the data being col­lected from pages that use multi-byte characters.

The Dig­i­talPulse Debug­ger will refresh as you move from page to page, show­ing you the data col­lected across your entire site, but it still requires you to walk through your site man­u­ally. If you’d like a more pow­er­ful debug­ging tool that will scan your site for you, sav­ing you time and uncov­er­ing a wide vari­ety of poten­tial issues with your data before these issues rear their ugly heads, check out Adobe Dig­i­talPulse.

Huge shout-out to Adam Egbert of Adobe Con­sult­ing for his hard work on this project, as well as to every­one else who con­tributed to the improve­ment of this handy lit­tle tool.

(Note: The old JavaScript Debug­ger will con­tinue to be avail­able for your use indefinitely.)

As always, if you have any ques­tions about any­thing in this post, or about any­thing else related to the Adobe Online Mar­ket­ing Suite, please leave a com­ment here or con­tact me on Twit­ter and I’ll do my best to get you the infor­ma­tion that you need. In par­tic­u­lar, feel free to share feed­back about this new Dig­i­talPulse Debug­ger and we’ll do our best to imple­ment your requests in a future release!