Debug tip: Show browser window to identify what's causing errors

[mountaindude]

Background

Do you get errors involving timeouts and selectors when running Butler Sheet Icons (=BSI)?
For example TimeoutError: waiting for selector '#grid-wrap' failed: timeout 30000ms exceeded

One possible cause of such errors is that the underlying Sense app does not behave as expected.

Maybe the login page does not show up as expected, or a popup in the app causes BSI not to find the expected sheet navigation buttons.

Solution

Add the --headless false option when starting BSI.
This will show the web browser that BSI uses to interact with Sense. Normally this browser is hidden but it can be made visible by using this command line option.

Carefully watch what happens when starting BSI and where it gets stuck and times out.
Is there something odd going on there? For example:

• BSI does not like popup login prompts. A form based login screen to Sense is assumed, so make sure to connect to a virtual proxy that has the "forms" property set in the QMC.
• Popups and dialog boxes that are automatically opened in the Sense app can also cause BSI to fail. These are uncommon but can be created by Sense extensions, custom html/css etc.

Note: When using --headless false there is a risk that the screen shots taken by BSI will have strange proportions and/or being cropped. Thus, once you have identified and fixed the issue you should re-run BSI with --headless true again to get proper thumbnails.