Grouped logging

Lets say that we have some console.log in our code, some of them are related to contact form other are related to user actions. We can split those logs into 2 sections: contact-form and user-actions. When we open our website, console displays all of those messages at once but we only want to debug user actions so what do we do? - remove console.log in contact form section? nope, there's better option - grouped logging. {{more}}

At first lets write down all section names and create a var that will hold only those we want to debug:

// Values: 'contact-form', user-actions'
var debug = ['user-actions']

Looks good, this way we won't have to look for the names of groups. Now we only have to create a function that will group logs, here's a code for it:

var log = function() {
    var args = [],
        first;

    // clone arguments
    Array.prototype.push.apply(args, arguments);

    // we need at least 2 arguments: group name and variable to log
    if (args.length > 1) {
        // get group name
        first = args.shift();

        // look for group name in debug array
        for (var i = 0; i < debug.length; i++)
            if (first === debug[i])
                console.log.apply(console, args);

    } else {
        // We have only 1 argument, there's no group name
        console.log.apply(console, args);
    }
};

Here's how to use it:

// This won't be logged because contact-form isn't in debug array
log('contact-form', 'Response: ', response);

//  This will be logged in console
log('user-action', 'Action: ', action);

That's all folks, thanks for reading!

Orginal post on my blog