Since its introduction in the January 2025 Valence 6.3 build, the Nitro App Builder Developer Console has become an indispensable tool for supporting advanced NAB development. Whether it’s used for monitoring real-time changes to App Variables, inspecting posts and their JSON responses, reviewing SQL statements or any myriad of other use cases, the Dev Console provides superb visibility to everything going on beneath the covers of the app. Developers simply click the Dev Console icon in the Valence Portal toolbar and the tool launches, ready to display all the pertinent details for the currently focused app.
One common need for the Dev Console is to inspect or monitor start-up actions that are initiated in conjunction with the launch of an app. But of course, to see the start-up activity you must already have the Dev Console open when the start-up is happening, which presents a kind of chicken-and-egg scenario because you can’t open the console until the app you want to monitor is already running.
To address this little quandary, the Dev Console was modified recently to automatically relaunch itself if an app being monitored is restarted, thus making it possible to see the startup actions. But there’s one gotcha to this process that many overlook, wherein the browser prevents the Dev Console relaunch to happen.
The over zealous pop-up blocker...
By default, many browsers today will attempt to block any pop-up windows that are not the direct result of a user explicitly clicking on something within the browser window. Hence, when the NAB Dev Console is dismissed as a result of closing or restarting an app (e.g., via a right-click directive to reload the app’s frame), the Portal’s attempt to automatically relaunch the Dev Console window in conjunction with the app’s relaunch may be thwarted. If you’re not looking in the right place you may miss the “pop up blocked” message, which would look something like this:
So this month’s tip is simple but highly impactful: If you would like to have the Dev Console automatically reopen whenever an app being monitored is closed and relaunched, if it’s not currently behaving that way then look for this pop-up blocker message and tell your browser it’s okay to permit pop-up attempt from your Valence instance.
Monitoring multiple apps simultaneously…
While were on the Dev Console topic, another item worth pointing out is an enhancement introduced with the most recent Valence 6.3 build (6.3.20250516) that makes it easier to monitor multiple apps simultaneously. Prior to this build, if you had two NAB apps open and attempted to open the Dev Console for both of them, the Dev Console windows would “step” on each other in such a way that you’d only be able to monitor the last opened app.
With the latest build, this overstepping is no longer a problem, as each open app will get its own dedicated Dev Console window, independent of any other active Dev Console windows monitoring other active apps.
For a great introduction to how the Dev Console can be put to use, be sure to check out Developer Diaries Episode 41, which covers all the basics.