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Add option to build non-minified libraries for non-prod environments

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Community Advisor and Adobe Champion

1/31/23

Description -

Adobe Experience Cloud Experience Platform Dynamic Data Collection Launch, by Adobe Tags minifies code when a library is built. That feature is super helpful for production environments, where site owners usually want to minimize the impact of loaded libraries. And that is great! Except for when you are actually trying to read the code afterwards. For example, minification turns my horrible, hacky, readable and commented code...

FrederikWerner_0-1675153650074.png

into this horrible, hacky, unreadable and uncommented code:

FrederikWerner_1-1675153684260.png

While the size advantage justifies the less readable code on production, practically every developer I've ever worked with complained about the minified code on any non-prod environment. If you just want to see what a piece of code does and why it won't work, minification does not help a lot.

The usual solution is to remove the .min from the Launch library's file name, but that requires a) knowledge of the feature and b) some manual intervention, browser plugins, or other effort. Even worse, if the library file name would ever change due to changed environments in Launch, an unknown number of people would need to update their already configured stuff too. That's not very cool.

In my personal experience, there is a general tendency per environment for either the minified or un-minified version to be preferred. Minified is fine for prod, but un-minified is what you want everywhere else. For that reason, I want to propose an additional toggle in the environment settings that would disable the minification during build, along the lines of this: 

FrederikWerner_2-1675154458459.png

Disabling this toggle would change the URL in the field below to the un-minified variant and cause all references to other code pieces, like Custom Code Actions, to also not be minified. While it would be enabled by default for all environments, it would give us an easy option to make everyone's life on non-prod a lot easier.

Why is this feature important to you -

Because I like efficiency

How would you like the feature to work -

See above

Current Behaviour -

2 Comments

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Employee

1/31/23

Frederik,

 

Thank you for the detailed feedback and feature request. I can certainly see how the current experience is both frustrating and inefficient in a non-prod environment. I have logged this and we will discuss prioritization and feasibility as a product team. Thanks again!

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7/18/23

It's also possible to generate sourcemap instead, which allow debug possible everywhere without impacting performance.
We could imagine an toggle per each environnements that disable the generation when someone absolutly don't want this feature (but it's often because something is present in the source code where it shouldn't).