Debugging WAB App in Visual Studio 2012

[AndrewHayden1]

I've built a simple app in WAB, downloaded it, unzipped it, run it off one of our web servers (successfully) but when I open it as a web site and try to debug it in VS (locally) I get "undefined(anonymous function) @ jimu.js/ConfigManager.js:105" in Chrome dev tools.  Am I missing something?  Any suggestions on how to successfully debug a WAB app in VS?

Though I'm not intending to use it, when I try to run it in Aptana I get:

Secure Connection Failed

The connection to 127.0.0.1:8020 was interrupted while the page was loading.

The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.

Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.

Thoughts as to what this issue may be?  Something between ide, ssl certificate and localhost?

[SubuSwaminathan1]

From just reading the content of those files, the server/db appears to contain json maintaining the state of the WAB apps, locale info and such misc things - makes sense why node might be writing to them on stop and restart.

I would suggest that you start a new discussion/thread documenting your experience with WAB + git and post your questions there. Maybe other WAB developers and even esri staff might chime in if they choose to.

Keep posting. Very useful info here.

Subu

[AndrewHayden1]

I appreciate all the thoughts here.  Although I've not been able to get \\arcgis-web-appbuilder-1.1\server\apps\[app_number] running in out of VS, I've been able to download the app host it on my local iis and then open the website from VS and debug it.  Once open, I am able to add the app to source control (in this case VSS).  I'm not familiar enough with GitHub but the upgrade path in either scenario concerns me.

[JunshanLiu]

For debugging, I suggest chrome.

[JunshanLiu]

Depends on what you want to do, I have this suggestion:

* If you want to create custom widget/theme, I suggest

    * Put the widget/theme under stemapp folder and use http://your host/webappbuilder/?id=stemapp to run and debug your widget/theme

    * Put your widget/theme in source control

* If you need to do the deep customization of the created app, such as change jimu.js code, I suggest:

    * Use WAB to create a new app as a starter app, and use http://your host/webappbuilder/apps/<appid> to run and debug your app.

    *  Put your app in source control.

[JordanBaumgardner]

We use VS2015 for our web development and really enjoy it. We mostly follow Robert's work flow as above and we use TFS for our code repository. After much debate we went with the following:

tfs\wab   <- we pulled the latest dev ver of WAB and added it to source control just in case.

tfs\wab\custom\widget   <- our custom widget code, we place here when we are done.

tfs\client\project\    <- our configured client setup, the code we deliver to the client. We develop the widget here at first then move it to the custom repo.

From Wab, we create the project and get it setup.

We develop the widget in place, then move it to the general repo when complete for use in other projects. That becomes the master. Any further mods are done there.

We then combine and deploy.

During development we generally debug the back end C# with VS2015 and use Chrome or IE's F12 to debug the JS.