Erlang Term Explorer (TX)

This app was created to fill the void in the data visualisation area. And to help you follow "know your data" paradigm. Basically it shows you your data in web browser via webserver listening to localhost.

What does it look like?

Features

• tx:show(Term) and tx:show(Term, Title)
  • Given an arbitrary term, saves it temporarily and creates an unique URL to it (similar to Pastebin but with faster/manual expiration). Clicking the URL in your console window will open web browser and load a page with tree-like term structure.
• tx:redbug(Spec) and tx:redbug(Spec, Options)
  • If you have Redbug available, then tx will run redbug:start and capture events output, then store it in a regular way as a browsable term.
• Process and ports are "inspectable", just click one to see.
• Proplists with printable keys are detected and formatted more compact.

Uses only standard Erlang libraries (inets), no external dependencies.

How to begin

Add https://github.com/kvakvs/tx as your application dependency or download it and compile manually. Run your application as usual. When you need to see things, call tx:show(Term). in Erlang console or insert call to tx:show where you need it.

NOTE: URL to see the pasted term is returned from tx:show, it will NOT be io:format'ted.

Running

Application tx will be started automatically and web server will be opened on your first call of tx:show/1.

Run manually via: tx:start().. Default port is 20000, and default host is localhost. If you set port to 0 in tx.app.src, then tx will start on random available port.

Example

tx:show(application:which_applications()).

The following line will show all sort of things in one term:

tx:show([<<123,32,1>>, <<1:1, 3:5, 45:7>>, <<"test\ttest">>, 123, 123.321, make_ref(), self(), erlang:ports(), fun()->ok end, {fun erlang:ports/0, 'test', "test"}]).

TODO

Possible things to add of improve

• Support compact display of value-only tuples and lists (multiple values per line)
• Backend could recognize record definitions and supply field information to frontend
• Detect proplists and display as pairs
• Paste term from clipboard
• Toggle nice vs. raw display (in case user wants to copy from page) or improve display so that copying from page would produce correct syntax
• Implement automatic expiration (cleanup loop on timer)
• Toolbox for External Term Format: encode, decode, compress, view in hex etc.
• Unfold the whole thing into introspection tool like tv (table viewer) or observer.