How to debug javascript in PrimeFaces 4.0

Introduction

With each new release of PrimeFaces, the JavaScript becomes more and more important in the framework.
This is no surprise as JavaScript is needed to give the end user a rich user interface. And in the latest release there is quit a lot of new JavaScript code added for the client Side validation framework.
But if you want to debug it in the browser, you see that the code is minified. And thus stepping through it line by line is not possible.
This post describes how you can do it.

Build custom version

The source code of PrimeFaces contains the human readable code and the idea is that we build a custom jar file which contains that readable version of the JavaScript.
As the code is open source, it is available on Google code. We can do a checkout with following command.
svn checkout http://primefaces.googlecode.com/svn/primefaces/tags/4_0

Now we go to the pom.xml file and make some small changes.
The most important one is the change of the version tag.  I have changed it to 4.0-DEBUG (you can find it at the top of the pom.xml file)

    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
    <groupId>org.primefaces</groupId>
    <artifactId>primefaces</artifactId>
    <packaging>jar</packaging>
    <version>4.0-DEBUG</version>
    <name>primefaces</name>
    <url>http://www.primefaces.org</url>

PrimeFaces uses a maven plugin to generate the JSF components and configuration files. 
This plugin is located in the PrimeFaces maven repository which you must include into the pom file. Otherwise the build will fail.

    <pluginRepositories>
        <pluginRepository>
            <id>primeFaces_repository</id>
            <url>http://repository.primefaces.org/</url>
        </pluginRepository>
    </pluginRepositories>

When you now execute the mvn install command, you will have a customized version of PrimeFaces in your local Maven repository which contains the non minified version of JavaScript.

Using this version in your project, by specifying it in a profile so that it doesn’t go into production, you can do debugging in your favourite browser.

Conclusion

We following the above steps, you have a custom version of PrimeFaces where the JavaScript is not minified and thus can be debugged in the browser. Of course it is not suited to go to production with this version.