This page is alive with extra information that can help you debug your pages. Can you see it?

Recently I had to debug a complex ASP page. The page asked the user for some information which it used to look up a lot of interelated data in a database. Then it called a COM component which calculated an answer. The rules were quite complex to say the least!

What I needed was a way to optionally display some information on the page so that the beta testers could help me pinpoint what had gone wrong during testing.

The answer is simple - test for a certain circumstance, and optionally do some Response.Write's with the data.

I do this on my development machine by testing if I'm running on a server called localhost, like this:

var sServer = "" + Request.ServerVariables ( "SERVER_NAME" ); bDebug = ( -1 != sServer.indexOf ( "localhost" ) );

The variable "bDebug" is then available for use wherever you need. For demonstration purposes this site uses a simpler strategy - you can simply add "?debug" to the URL's QueryString to see debug info!

You can test it easily by refreshing this page as Debug.asp?debug.