Troubleshooting trace logs in Content Server shouldn’t feel like digging through a maze of cryptic information. That’s why we built the Trace Log Viewer in Ravenblack Application Analyzer — to give administrators and support teams a clear, browser-based way to view, interpret, and act on trace logs faster than ever. And now that OpenText has improved the raw data available, we’ve added even more functionality to our viewer tool, allowing administrators to view the trace log data in the context of the actual OScript code that generated it.
While we have already created a powerful, collated view of key trace information, function names and line numbers aren’t particularly useful unless you have access to them in the actual source code. With this new enhancement, we have added the OScript code context to our browser-based analysis tool.
Available in Content Server version 25.2 and later versions, we modified our Trace Log Viewer to detect if the OScript code is present in the trace log, and to use the information accordingly. Here are the modifications we’ve made (so far):
1. In the Trace Error Description, we supplemented the description with the specific line from the code that caused the trace error.
2. We added a Code Surrounding Trace section. As shown in the screen shot below, this new section shows all the code that surrounds the line where the error occurred, and the offending line is marked in red— essentially a more visual view of the code excerpt that is now in the trace logs. In this example we see an entire OScript function as this particular trace was caused deliberately by one of our debugging sub-tags.
3. To the existing Stack Summary section (all the topline information) we added a menu option to allow the surrounding code to be viewed for the top five frames in the stack. Currently the new Content Server feature only provides code for five frames so the menu only appears for those five items.
4. Selecting the menu option opens a modal with all available source displayed in a relatively readable form as shown in the next screen shot.
The extra white space seen in this example is exactly as found in the original source, and for those interested, this particular source is an example of the script that is automatically generated, compiled, and run for any WebReport that executes on your system. In this example, you can see the results of this line of WebReports code:
[LL_REPTAG_'' ASSOCACTION:CREATE SETVAR:children RB_TRACE /]
As mentioned above, the RB_TRACE sub-tag is deliberately forcing a trace (for demo purposes) in this case. We use this sub-tag for more advanced troubleshooting, where we might not have access to builder. Now with this new feature, the trace data has the code context that is ultimately necessary to reach any real understanding of a trace log.
As an aside (and a plug), we deliver a five-hour, remote training course for WebReports developers that provides most of the key information to help debug WebReport issues through these logs, or using Eclipse, in addition to sub-tag development skills and tools.
For more information on the Application Analyzer or WebReports Specialist training with Eclipse email info@ravenblackts.com.