Mystery unravelled!

A bit of my last release failed. Mainly because my javascript component was failing in an odd place. I couldn't figure out why, and so xpcshell tests never got complete.

I went back to the problem today. Firing up venkman and the javascript shell, I started to play around with it some more. I manually tested (grumble) both components independently and they both worked. But they didn't work together. I couldn't get one to return an instance of the other, and it was bothering me.

Walking through the javascript in venkman, It got all the way to the return value and throws the exception there.

        if (regkey.hasValue(value) == false)
            return null;
       
        key.init(regkey, relPath, value);
       
        return key;    /* Always failing here */
    },

Looking at the terminal, I noticed a strange assertion coming up after the code fails. I asked in #developers, and even sdwilsh (a very knowledgeable and promising character that interned last year) took a stab at it and couldn't find anything obvious. I started losing hope of ever getting this blasted thing working. Looking up the assertion didn't help, and neither did a NS_ENSURE_TRUE warning that were both being fired after the code failing.

I finally had it. It couldn't be the .js file. It had to be something more. But what else is there except the idl interface? I looked, examining each line. Then I noticed something very, very, wrong.

void getKey(in unsigned long root, in string path);

The return value was void. I must have just put void there first because I didn't know what I wanted to call the other interface. I promptly change it to :

nsIWindowsRegistryKey getKey(in unsigned long root, in string path);

And it starts to work in the javascript shell, which is absolutely a relief. Now I can start seeing if tests work.