GWT2.8RC2 : compile time user.agent value (safari) does not match the runtime user.agent value (gecko1_8) ?

[Thomas Lacroix]

Hi,

I have an app that automatically reports "Uncaught exception" encountered by users.

It has been compiled with GWT2.8RC2 and in prod for a few days and it has been reporting a couple of "Uncaught exception" as follow:

 - Uncaught exception: com.google.gwt.useragent.client.UserAgentAsserter$UserAgentAssertionError: Possible problem with your *.gwt.xml module file.

The compile time user.agent value (safari) does not match the runtime user.agent value (gecko1_8).

Expect more errors.

 - User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/31.0.1650.57 Safari/537.36

I am not sure what that means, if this is a serious error and I am not able to reproduce it in my environnement. Any help ?

I didn't get this error reported prior to compliation with GWT2.8RC2 (I used 2.4, 2.6, and 2.7) but that might be a coincidence.

Thomas

[Thomas Broyer]

That error generally means that you have compiled your app with a limited set of supported user.agent values (e.g. only one, during development) but run it in a user agent that's not in the list.

The "compile time user.agent value" comes from the permutation that's being used, and the "runtime user.agent value" is computed at runtime.

They should generally be the same value, because the same computation is done to select the appropriate permutation; but if you somehow "bypass" that computation by only compiling for a single user.agent (generally to speed up compilation during development / debugging), then you might be in that situation that they're different.

What's strange here is that the "runtime user.agent value" is gecko1_8 whereas you're using Chrome (so should be "safari").

Could it be, maybe, someone spoofing his user agent in Chrome to look like Firefox and only reloading the hidden iframe after changing the user agent? (so the permutation has already been selected for Chrome, but the runtime value is now for Firefox)

Or maybe a Firefox user spoofing to look like Chrome but in a broken way such that the hidden iframe the GWT code runs in does not see the spoofed user.agent (so the top-level window looks like Chrome and selects the 'safari' permutation –compile time user.agent value– but the iframe sees the real user.agent and looks like Firefox –runtime user.agent value) ? (that very old Chrome version hints that this could be the case)

FYI, you can disable this with <set-configuration-property name="user.agent.runtimeWarning" value="false"/> but I would keep it if I were you.

Maybe add the permutation ID (http://www.gwtproject.org/javadoc/latest/com/google/gwt/core/client/GWT.html#getPermutationStrongName()) to the log so you can later compare with your compilation-mappings.txt and access logs to see if it's possibly a bug in GWT (I doubt it, but who knows?)

Also, based on compilation-mappings.txt, maybe have a look at your access logs to see if some user agents load an unexpected permutation, and possibly cross-check with other requests from the same user agent (or if you trace users with a cookie and have that in your logs, use that to possibly find if some people are spoofing the user agent: multiple requests by the same user/session with different user agents for instance)

[Thomas Lacroix]

Thanks for the information. It makes sense if it spoofing, I will dig into it.

Thomas

[Kirill Prazdnikov]

I dont see any need for permutations today for new apps. All modern bfowsers run default perm perfectly well.

[Thomas Broyer]

This will be the goal with GWT 3 I believe.
But what do you mean by "default permutation"? Which user.agent value?

[Kirill Prazdnikov]

"safari", I think it is one that used for chrome.