ReferenceError: "alert" is not defined

Question

I am trying to call a java script function from java code.

Here is my Java code

    public static void main(String[] args) throws FileNotFoundException {
    try {
        /**
         * To call a anonymous function from java script file
         */
        ScriptEngine engine = new ScriptEngineManager()
                .getEngineByName("javascript");
        FileReader fr = new FileReader("src/js/MySpec.js");
        engine.eval(fr);

    } catch (ScriptException scrEx) {
        scrEx.printStackTrace();
    }
}

Here is my java script file:

(function() {
  alert("Hello World !!!");
})();

But when I run main method of driver class it is giving me error as below:

Exception in thread "main" javax.script.ScriptException: sun.org.mozilla.javascript.internal.EcmaError: ReferenceError: "alert" is not defined. (<Unknown source>#2) in <Unknown source> at line number 2
at com.sun.script.javascript.RhinoScriptEngine.eval(RhinoScriptEngine.java:110)
at javax.script.AbstractScriptEngine.eval(AbstractScriptEngine.java:232)
at Java6RhinoRunner.load(Java6RhinoRunner.java:42)
at Java6RhinoRunner.main(Java6RhinoRunner.java:12)

What I know is that it need some script engine to execute it.

For that I added rhino.jar file in to my class path.But this is not working.

I an not getting how to solve this error. Please help.Thanks in advance.

Oath

Instead of alert("msg");, try to use console.log("Msg"); as described here. Alert is only defined within a browser. – Execrable

Answer 1

alert is not part of JavaScript, it's part of the window object provided by web browsers. So it doesn't exist in the context you're trying to use it in. (This is also true of setInterval, setTimeout, and other timer-related stuff, FYI.)

If you just want to do simple console output, Rhino provides a print function to your script, so you could replace alert with print. Your script also has access to all of the Java classes and such, so for instance java.lang.System.out.println('Hello'); would work from your JavaScript script (although it's a bit redundant with the provided print function). You can also make Java variables available to your script easily via ScriptEngine.put, e.g:

engine.put("out", System.out);

...and then in your script:

out.println('Hello from JavaScript');

...so that's a third way to do output from the script. :-)

See the discussion in the javax.script package documentation, in particular ScriptEngine#put, or for more complex cases, Bindings (and SimpleBindings) and ScriptContext.

Hekker

Much like using something like NodeJS, you can execute code but since you are not running in a browser you cannot have the benefits of the browser, such as alert boxes. – Greathouse