Practical Console Geekery

I am a geek. There is no way around it, and I have accepted my fate as such.

I became a developer because I so enjoyed the process of creation, the tinkering, and numbers. Do you have to love those same things to be a great programmer? Certainly not. A wild sense of curiosity doesn’t hurt, though.

Some of that curiosity and my tinkering habit has led me to an example of leveraging the Developer Console to gain a better understanding of SuiteScript. Using the Console’s “timer” API, I was able to very quickly illustrate the performance difference between loading a record to read a field value versus using the lookups we explored last week.

require(["N/record", "N/search"], function (r, s) {
    console.time("Load Record");
    var customerId = r.load({
        type: r.Type.SALES_ORDER,
        id: 874
    }).getValue({fieldId: "entity"});
    console.log(customerId);
    console.timeEnd("Load Record");
    
    console.time("Lookup");
    var customerId2 = s.lookupFields({
        type: r.Type.SALES_ORDER,
        id: 874,
        columns: ["entity"]
    }).entity[0].value;
    console.log(customerId2);
    console.timeEnd("Lookup");
});

I won’t give away the results here; to satisfy your curiosity, I recommend you copy and paste this into your own Console to see the results for yourself.