pbiviz start - don't minimize

Question

can someone tell mehow to work out how to turn of minification in the pbiviz start command, so i can debug custom visuals easily in chrome?otherwise, can someone give me any ideas on how to debug a visual in vscode?

dm-p · Accepted Answer

Hey jonespossibly,
It's not possible to debug directly using VS code, as visuals are not like standard web apps due to all the other dependencies needed from the main Power BI window. Your TypeScript code is transpiled to Javascript and the visual is packaged via Webpack and served to the Power BI service via a websocket.
However, when running pbiviz start it is not minified, just 'raw' JS due to the aforementioned transpile, so is not 100% like-for-like. It will get minified when you package the visual.
Not sure if you've seen this page, but the easy way to check state of variables etc is to add the debugger statement to as many places as you need it. If you have the dev tools open, this will pause execution and let you check things and step into/over code, e.g.:

(this should also show the differences between source TS and transpiled/unminified JS)
You can probably see I have a lot of Debugger lines (capital 'D') - this is a class I have built that logs to the console if I have a switch enabled globally. I turn this off when I package so that my visual doesn't log in this state, as it can slow things down if the dev tools are open, and also the console is not an object on all browsers (some mobile devices), so this can be a gotcha when testing in multiple locations when ready to package.
So basically, lots of debugger, console.log and try/catch statements 🙂
Regards,
Daniel
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