LOG Action

[bkonia]

Even with Rule Evaluation level logging enabled, AIM's logging is very incomplete, making it difficult to debug rules and processes. It shows the result of each rule, but it doesn't provide any context for the result, such as the attribute values of the BO's involved. So if a rule fails, you often can't figure out exactly why it failed.

I'd like to propose a LOG action that could be inserted anywhere in an action list to write arbitrary data to the log file. For example, you could log a static text string, or the value of an attribute, or an entire BO, which would display all the attributes and their values.

[tford]

In the mean time, i'm sure you know you could create a BO to do that.

[bkonia]

In the mean time, i'm sure you know you could create a BO to do that.

I assume you mean creating an object to store manually-created log entries. Presently, I'm using the EXPORT action to create a log file, but neither of these approaches is ideal because the log entries are not correlated with the AIM logger.

Frequently, we need to view the attributes of an object before and after some action has occurred. While you can certainly write the attributes to a log file or the database, it's difficult to keep track of the sequence of events, when bouncing back and forth between two log files, not to mention, you end up with redundant logging, since AIM creates entries in its own log file each time you write to an external log file.

It would be much better if we could view the log actions inline.

[tford]

Totally agree Brad. I just mentioned the alternative in the mean time for those that might not think of that approach.