Obscuring is the name of a compression mechanism that is used by default on the Visual WebGui framework's client resources.

Basically what obscuring does is the following:

• It removes unnecessary white spaces and comments from the CSS, JavaScript, and XSLT client resources before they are uploaded to the client.
• It Renames all JavaScript functions to coded names, that for example can begin with "sb" followed by the unique id number of this function.

This step also changes all the function calls to those functions to call the functions with their new names.

All of this dramatically reduces the size of the client resources, resulting in much shorter load times.

What this also does though (as a side effect) is that it makes the JavaScript file uploaded to the client virtually incomprehensible.
In a development phase when client resources need to be viewed and interpreted visually, it is good practice to temporarily disable the obscuring mechanism.
To learn how to disable the obscuring mechanism, please see the Disable Obscuring article.

Obscured JavaScript functions can call JavaScript functions of other applications that are deployed on the same domain.

There is however an issue with JavaScript on external applications calling obscured functions.
The reason is that when calling those functions you would use their non-obscured name, and when the function is obscured, it's name is changed to some other coded name.
There is an issue on the subject, that you can see here.
Within this issue we will add a client library that will allow access to the obscured JavaScript functions using their original names.

There is an article showing how to workaround the obscuring mechanism and still be able to communicate with obscured client resources from an external source (on the same domain).
You can view this article here.

• Configuring - General Tab - Disable Obscuring
• Communicating with a FormBox

• How to call obscured JS function given its name (Events_CreateEvent)?
• Speedup App Launch

• VWG-4761 - Create a JavaScript library for communicating between ASP.NET and VWG applications