Recently, I was debugging a regression where I wanted to watch change’s in an element’s property at runtime. Specifically, I wanted to watch the URL change when I select different colors in Tesla’s customizer. By using the Inspect Element tool, I can find the relevant image in the tree, and then when I pick a different color in the page, the Developer Tools briefly highlight the changes to the image’s attributes:

Unfortunately, you might notice that the value in the xlink:href property contains a ... in the middle of it, making it difficult to see what’s changed. I noted that the context menu offers a handy “Break on” submenu to break execution whenever the node changes:

…but I lamented that there’s no Watch attribute command to log the changing URLs to the console. Mozillian April King offered a helpful snippet that provides this functionality.

After selecting the image (which points Console variable $0 at the element), type the following in the Console:

new MutationObserver(i => console.log(i[0].target.attributes['xlink:href'])).observe($0,
{ attributes: ['xlink:href']});

This simple snippet creates a MutationObserver to watch the selected element’s xlink:href attribute, and every time it changes, the callback writes the current attribute value to the console:

Cool, huh?

Thanks, April!

-Eric

Impatient optimist. Dad. Author/speaker. Created Fiddler & SlickRun. PM @ MSFT '01-'12, and '18-, presently working on Microsoft Edge. My words are my own. View more posts