Debugging with the Tracer tool

Purpose

Use the Tracer to test and debug a variety of things, including activities, decision rules, service rules, parse rules, and processes. You can see in summary or detail the processing that occurs as you or another requestor executes an activity.

You can pause and resume processing, view or set the value of watch variables, and drill down to step-by-step details. You can view trace events for any requestor connected to your server node, not just your own session.

Starting the Tracer

To start the Tracer tool:

• Click the Tracer icon in the Designer Studio to trace your current session and Thread.
• Select in a service or activity rule form header.

Using the Tracer to test and debug

To use the Tracer, you typically:

1. Set up trace conditions.
2. Start tracing and capturing events. Click Playto trace and click Pauseto stop tracing.
3. Optionally, save the Tracer output on your local system. By default, the system saves the output as an XML file.
4. Analyze the results.

   To interactively examine details about an event, select values in the event's row in the Tracer display. See Understanding results. To analyze event details outside of the system, use the saved Tracer output file. See PDN article Use the Tracer Viewer tool to summarize Tracer XML output to learn about and download a Windows viewer for Tracer output XML files.

Depending on your access role, some Tracer capabilities may not be available to you.

Step 1. Setting up trace conditions

Use the following controls at the top of the Tracer to set up trace conditions.

Button	Function	Help
Remote Tracer	Choose a requestor session other than your own. Wait a few seconds until the Tracer connects.	Selecting a connection
Settings	Select which RuleSets, rules, and events are to be traced (using the Trace Options window).	Setting Tracer options
Breakpoints	Set or change breakpoints.	Setting breakpoints
Watch	Set or change watch variables.	Setting watch variables

Step 2. Tracing and capturing events

After setting the trace conditions (such as the connection, events to trace, and breakpoints), the usual steps to trace and capture events are:

1. Click Play to start tracing events.
2. Move or minimize the Tracer window so that you can see the Designer Studio.
3. Perform the work that you want to trace (or in the case of tracing a requestor session other than your own session, wait for the system to perform the work in that session).

   As the work is performed in the system, the Tracer displays the traced events, according to the selected conditions. Each event is a row in the Tracer display.

4. When you have completed the events you want to trace, click Pauseto stop tracing.

Note: if you are tracing data pages and see multiple "ADP Load" events with the same name, make sure you have only one tracer window open. If you have multiple tracer windows open, the event results may distribute across several windows, making it hard to evaluate the processes.

Tips for the Tracer display:

If you only need to work offline with the Tracer results, and do not want to interactively view details of the displayed events, you can choose to suppress the event display by setting the Max Trace Events to Display to zero (0) in the Trace Options window. Using this setting reduces the network traffic and workstation load if you only require the output in a file to work with it offline. When the events display is suppressed, use the Save button to save the file with the output results.

To reduce the quantity of detail sent to the Tracer, select the Abbreviate Events box in the Trace Options window. This can improve performance of the requestor session being traced so that elapsed time statistics during tracing are closer to the normal value (when not being traced). However, when this box is selected, some watch variables may not operate correctly. Clear this box when watch variables are important to your debugging.

See Setting Tracer options.

To change trace conditions after tracing has started, first pause tracing, and then use the appropriate option listed in the above table.

Use the following controls to perform the corresponding action.

Button	Function
Clear	Erase the displayed events.
Pause	Pause the session being traced at the next possible moment.
Continue	Resume processing after a Pause button click, or after a breakpoint event. Appears when tracing is paused (after clicking ).

Step 3. Optional: Save the Tracer output on your local system

Click Save to save the Tracer results to your local system for offline analysis.

By default, the system saves the output as an XML file. For information about a Windows viewer for Tracer output XML files, see PDN article Use the Tracer Viewer tool to summarize Tracer XML output.

Step 4. Analyze the results

The Tracer display is interactive. The value in the Event Type column indicates that row's event. Click the row to view the details about that event.

For example, when the DB Query option is specified as a traced event, clicking on a row with SQL Queries in the Event Type column opens a window that displays details such as how long the query took, the SQL statement that was used, and other information.

When the results are saved as a local file, the file contains this detailed event information.

Adjusting the file buffer size for the Tracer results Tracer tips and notes Tracer troubleshooting Tracing services Understanding Tracer results