Is there a way to find what is creating/updating globals?

General
1

Guys,

Is there a way to find what tab/function is updating a global variable ? i am up to about 40 tabs now and trying to track down where/what is updating a couple of globals is doing my head in !

Craig

2

If you enter global.set in the search field it will give you a list of all nodes including that statement. Thats one way. Another is if you open the flow file in a text editior and search for the same phrase, then you also see "more inside" where it happens so to say

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1 Like
3

Thanks - Much appreciated - it would be a nice feature in the Debug window/COntext browser to be able to highlight the variable and click on it.

Craig

4

Just to add that I found I was getting to a similar position, not just with context variables but also MQTT topics. So I started adding a standard function to all updates that add an updated timestamp and an updatedBy which indicates the node-red instance, tab name and roughly what function/node did the update. That way, I don't have to keep searching for things but can see at a glance what updated what.

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5

That sounds like a great idea. Using the new User Properties feature of MQTT 5 I think I should be able to add those as User Properties so avoiding the requirement to modify the payload, which would mess up existing flows.

6

On MQTT, they are extra topics beneath the main topic. I sometimes add them using a function late in the flow.

I typically make my global vars match the structure of my MQTT topics which minimises flow complexity.

7

Julian - could you give me an example of a MQTT topic and the corresponding Global that you would use ?

Craig

8

Here is an extract from the known_devices global var showing the same data as my MQTT example:

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The main difference between MQTT topics and JS objects is that while you can have a value on a parent topic in MQTT (as you see in the wiser topic structure), you can't do that exactly the same on a JS object. So the equivalent object for something like the wiser data (actually I don't happen to keep that as a global var because I just keep the whole wiser object that is updated every minute whereas the mqtt topics shown are useful because they are only updated when necessary) would be something like:

  ...
  BatteryLevel: {
    value: 'Normal',
    updated: ...,
    updatedBy: ...
  }
9

Thanks for this info Julian

Craig

10

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