Dynamic Service Portal Breadcrumbs, Corrected (again!)

“What we see depends mainly on what we look for.”
— Sir John Lubbock

One of the nice things about sharing your code with others is they end up testing it for you, and they do it from a different perspective than your own. The other day I received a comment from Ken out in California regarding my Dynamic Service Portal Breadcrumbs widget. He wanted to let me know that whenever he dragged the widget onto a page in the Portal Page Designer, the widget would disappear. I’ve had that little widget for quite a while now, and I have corrected it, perfected it, enhanced it, and I was actually aware of that behavior, but I had always just chalked that up as an irritating annoyance. From Ken’s perspective, though, it was a problem that needed to be addressed, and of course, he is correct. So, I decided to see if I could figure out why it was doing that, and if I could actually fix the problem.

I started out by doing a little research, just to see if anyone else had experienced this phenomenon. Sure enough, other people had reported the same behavior with other widgets, and the common thread always seemed to be that there was some coding error in the Client Script of the widget. Armed with that little tidbit of information, I set out to do a little experimenting.

The first thing that I did was comment out all of the code inside of the Client Script function and then run over to the Page Designer to see if that had any effect. Sure enough, the widget now appeared on the screen. That told me that I was on the right track, and that the issue actually was some problem in the Client Script. After that, it was just a matter of running through a sort of binary search, revealing and commenting out various chunks of code until I finally narrowed it down to the one line that was causing the problem:

var portalSuffix = ' - ' + $rootScope.portal.title.trim();

The reason that this worked on all of the pages in all of the portals where I have used it, but not in the Page Designer itself, was that the Page Designer has no title defined. When you try to run the trim() function on a String that doesn’t exist, you are going to get a null pointer exception. That’s obviously not good. So now what?

To step back just a bit, the whole point in grabbing the title was to look for it in the page title and remove it. Page titles in the form of <page title> – <portal title> are extra wide and contain the redundant portal title value, so I wanted to strip off that portion, if it was present. If there is no portal title, then that entire segment of code has no value, so I ended up checking for the presence of the title first, and then tucking all of that code underneath that conditional.

if ($rootScope.portal && $rootScope.portal.title) {
	var portalSuffix = ' - ' + $rootScope.portal.title.trim();
	var cutoff = thisTitle.indexOf(portalSuffix);
	if (cutoff != -1) {
		thisTitle = thisTitle.substring(0, cutoff);
	}
}

That was it. Problem solved. Thank you, Ken, for prodding me to take a look at that. It turned out to be a relatively easy fix, and something that I should have addressed a long time ago. Here’s an Update Set with the corrected code.