Three ways to log errors and messages in firefox

After making a couple of simple firefox plugins, I decided to write a really good Javascript logger. With the previous experience and a little more dig around, I am thinking about providing three primary logging target implementations which firefox supports out of the box.

1. Dump
2. Components.utils.reportError
3. nsIConsoleService

To use dump() function, you have to make sure that your firefox application is started with the command line option ‘-console’ after you set the setting ‘browser.dom.window.dump.enabled’ to true. This is good for really any logging, but it’s limited to command line logging.

‘Components.utils.reportError’ on the other hand, is really great for reporting errors, and it’s usually used as the exception catching block like below:

try {
 this.could.raise.an.exception;
} catch(e) {
 Components.utils.reportError(e); // report the error and continue execution
}
 

My favorite one would be the ‘nsIConsoleService’, as it is logging directly into the console, and you can easily create a wrapper into it to make it really powerful.

function LOG(msg) {
 var consoleService = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/consoleservice;1"]
                                .getService(Components.interfaces.nsIConsoleService);
 consoleService.logStringMessage(msg);
}
 

You can even specify line numbers, flags and category ;-) through scripterror component class that comes with the firefox!

var scriptError = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/scripterror;1"]
                             .createInstance(Components.interfaces.nsIScriptError);
scriptError.init(aMessage, aSourceName, aSourceLine, aLineNumber,
                  aColumnNumber, aFlags, aCategory);
consoleService.logMessage(scriptError);