Junction Tips and Tricks

Debugging

There are two important tips to help debug your Junction application. First, don't forget that Junction uses XMPP's Multi-User Chat profile for communication. So, using a standard XMPP client, you can join the room and send/receive messages to your activity.

Second, you can force your activity to be in a fixed session in one of two ways: Either use a URI to bind your actor to a Junction activity, or specify a session ID on your Activity Script:

  var ascript = {ad: "my.demo.app", ... }
      ascript.sessionID = "fixedDebugSession";

Javascript

Often, the structure of your Junction application may take you down the path of writing something like the following:

var actor = {};
actor.onMessageReceived =
  function(msg,header) {
    if (msg.action == "update") {
      // do something
    }
    
    if (msg.action == "foo") { 
      // do something else
    }
  
    if (msg.action == "bar") {
     // do something more
    }
  };

One alternative is to do something like the following:

function MyActor() {

  this.onUpdate = function(msg,header) {
    // do something
  }

  this.onFoo = function(msg,header) {
    // do something else
  }

  this.onBar = function(msg,header) {
    // do something more
  }


  this.onMessageReceived =
    function(msg,header) {
      if (msg.action in this.registry) {
        this.registry[msg.action](msg,header);
    }
  };

  
  this.registry = {};
  this.registry["update"] = this.onUpdate;
  this.registry["foo"] = this.onFoo;
  this.registry["bar"] = this.onBar;
}

There are countless ways to be creative with metaprogramming, and we'd love to hear your solution.

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