Older versions of Internet Explorer have a problem with some legal Javascript syntax, namely, a comma appearing after the last element of a list:

var things = [
    "thing 1",
    "thing 2",
    ];

We happen to have a number of data tables like this that have to be maintained by hand. We are pretty good about testing real code changes in a number of browsers, but we’ve had problems where we “just” changed data, and skipped IE. When moving lines around in these tables, it’s very easy to leave a trailing comma, and most browsers don’t care. But IE completely gives up on the rest of the file, and when multiple files are concatenated and compressed together, that means giving up on much of our Javascript code, and things don’t work right.

Finding problems like this is the kind of thing computers are good at, so why not let them. One idea was a checkin hook, but I figured we could detect it earlier than that. By using Django middleware, we could check the files for problems as soon as the next request to the developer’s server, and the developer wouldn’t be able to continue with their work until the problem was fixed.

Django middleware has a very useful feature that I’ve exploited a few times recently: the __init__ is run before any requests are handled, and it can raise MiddlewareNotUsed, which will remove the middleware for good after that. This makes it a good way to do something once on startup.

Here’s a middleware implementation to check a set of Javascript files for this particular error:

class CheckJavascriptMiddleware(object):
    """Find annoying Javascript errors."""

    # Text that would trigger the alarm, but are actually ok.
    dont_alarm_patterns = [
        r"\{\d+,\}",        # in base.js:           {20,}
        r"\[\\\.,]",        # in jquery-1.4.2.js:   [\.,]
        ]

    def __init__(self):
        self.errors = []

        # Get the file names from the django-compress setting.
        for specs in settings.COMPRESS_JS.values():
            for filename in specs['source_filenames']:
                self.check_file(filename)

        if not self.errors:
            # No errors, so get rid of this middleware.
            raise MiddlewareNotUsed()

    def check_file(self, filename):
        js = open(filename, "r").read()
        # Remove any false alarm text.
        for pat in self.dont_alarm_patterns:
            js = re.sub(pat, "", js)
        # See if any problems remain.
        m = re.search(r",\s*[\]\}]", js)
        if m:
            self.errors.append((filename, "trailing comma"))

    def process_request(self, request):
        # This won't get called if there were no errors, 
        # because the middleware will be removed.
        html = "<h1>Please fix these errors</h1>" 
        for filename, problem in self.errors:
            html += "<p>%s in %s</p>" % (problem, filename)
        return HttpResponse(html)

Note here that we only raise the exception to remove the middleware if there were no errors. If there were, we leave the middleware in place, and obnoxiously return a “Please fix” message for every request. I figure that should be noticeable enough that the developer won’t check in extra commas, or if they do, will earn the ire of every other developer, a strong deterrent for the future.

We use django-compress to concatenate and compress our Javascript files, so this middleware can simply use its settings to find the files to check. You may need to change the code to get your source file names some other way.

Of course, the Javascript “parsing” here is ridiculously simplistic, and the list of patterns not to alarm on is also simplistic, but it gets the job done for us. A smarter parser or other form of linter could be incorporated into similar machinery. Even if it is simplistic, I like the idea of my code checking my code for me.