Debug Wicket AJAX in the CMS
To see what the CMS Ajax framework is doing, you can start the CMS in Wicket development mode. The most convenient way to do this is via an extra command line option:
mvn -Pcargo.run -Dcargo.jvm.args='-Dwicket.configuration=development'
Tomcat should now log the following message during startup:
[INFO] [talledLocalContainer] ******************************************************************** [INFO] [talledLocalContainer] *** WARNING: Wicket is running in DEVELOPMENT mode. *** [INFO] [talledLocalContainer] *** ^^^^^^^^^^^ *** [INFO] [talledLocalContainer] *** Do NOT deploy to your live server(s) without changing this. *** [INFO] [talledLocalContainer] *** See Application#getConfigurationType() for more information. *** [INFO] [talledLocalContainer] ********************************************************************
If you now access the CMS it will look exactly the same, but some changes are taking place under the hood:
- the HTML markup contains comments that indicate the start and end of each Wicket component
- Wicket will complain when component contain non-serializable fields (which means Wicket cannot serialize sessions)
- When Wicket Ajax calls generate an error, a Wicket Ajax debug button will appear in the bottom-right corner of the page. Clicking this button opens a logger window that shows the Ajax responses coming in from the server.
- several places in the CMS (e.g. the Channel Manager and CKEditor) will no longer concatenate JavaScript files, but include all separate JavaScript sources to ease debugging.