Troubleshoot issues with Chrome DevTools

Problem

There may be times where users notice ClinSpark behaving in a strange way. Did you click on an action item (hyperlink, button, etc.) and nothing happen? Things seem unusually slow when trying to perform regular tasks? When these sorts of issues occur, our support team will often request to see the issue ‘in action’ via a screencast. However, we may also request to see what the browser developer tool console output shows as well.

Solution

This article covers Chrome developer tools. Similar workflows may also be accomplished in Chromium browsers, such as Microsoft Edge.

Chrome DevTools is a set of web developer tools built directly into the Google Chrome browser. DevTools can help you diagnose problems quickly, which ultimately helps the IQVIA support team assist in troubleshooting.

DevTools can be opened in a few ways:

Right-click an area of the webpage and select ‘Inspect’…

Or, click Customize and control Google Chrome, and then select More Tools > Developer Tools.

Or use keyboard input.

Command+Option+C (Mac)
Control+Shift+C (Windows, Linux, Chrome OS).

Once you have Chrome DevTools open, locate the Console.

Web developers will often have applications log messages to the Console to make sure that certain JavaScript is working as expected. It’s normal for messages to appear in this console, and the presence of warnings in the output does not mean that ClinSpark is functioning incorrectly. The Chrome DevTools console collects a lot of information which are helpful to our engineering team when troubleshooting.

Under normal circumstances, the console should report no errors or warnings.

However sometimes, you might see messages like these:

IQVIA support may request a screenshot of the console output in areas of the application you experience issues. The example above is demonstrating a message that occurs when ClinSpark is unable to communicate with the ClinSpark Agent on the computer, which is required for certain features like Barcode Printing. When this occurs, a more meaningful message is presented to users within the application, instead of being hidden in the console.