1121351 - Use outputted objects in the DevTools console

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(DevTools :: Console, defect)

Description

[Kumar Harsh]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:36.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/36.0
Build ID: 20150112004004

Steps to reproduce:

The objects which are ouputted to the console should be accessible within the console for further manipulation.

Say, I console.log()'ed an array [2,3,4], and it is outputted on the console, and can be inspected,
then I should be able to right click on that Array output and say "Use in Console", which would make it available in the $0 variable (or something similar), and then I can do array operations like $0.push(10);

This is incredibly useful when I output DOM nodes selected via document.qsa or jquery, and then I need to do some operations on that node. It can be the case that the node is not directly accessible via the webpage, or takes a lot of work to access it, thus making this route much more feasible.

This functionality has been there in firebug for quite some time now, and I believe everyone would benefit from this nifty feature.

Comment 1

[Jeff Griffiths (:canuckistani) (:⚡︎)]

FYI in bug 792063 we've implemented the convention of setting $_ to the result of the last expression - while this does not cover all of your use cases, you may find it useful.

Comment 2

[Kumar Harsh]

@Jeff Sorry for the delay in this reply. This $_ thing just doesn't cut it for most of my use cases. $_ *only* works if I had that object as the result of the *last expression*. This means,

+ I can't get the object of any expression but the last
+ I can't manipulate or use objects I outputted from my code. (Especially painful if the output is from an operation which may be non-idempotent, say a success callback from an AJAX request)

Comment 3

[Jeff Griffiths (:canuckistani) (:⚡︎)]

(In reply to Kumar Harsh from comment #2)
> @Jeff Sorry for the delay in this reply. This $_ thing just doesn't cut it
> for most of my use cases. $_ *only* works if I had that object as the result
> of the *last expression*. This means,
> 
> + I can't get the object of any expression but the last
> + I can't manipulate or use objects I outputted from my code. (Especially
> painful if the output is from an operation which may be non-idempotent, say
> a success callback from an AJAX request)

FYI We've been considering two additional features, logged as bugs today:

* bug 1154363 Use $variable in console 
* bug 1154359 Set $1 ... $n to recent expression results

Comment 4

[Nicolas Chevobbe [:nchevobbe]]

Can't find the bug where it was introduced, but we now have a "Store as global variable" context menu entry which then allow you to have a reference to said object (e.g. temp0)