Informational Trace logs
In North52 informational trace logs are available in two locations:
- From within the Formula form
- From Trace Logs menu on the North52 App
On the Formula Form
Here you can find trace logs generated by this specific formula:
You can either click on the Test & Trace button to bring up the Test & Trace Console:
The Test and Trace console loads with the most recent version of the tracelog included, and we can manually refresh it from the Load Trace button if we want to. We can switch between full and basic views, the full view shows additional information outside of the formula execution, or under quick links navigate directly to specific sheets in the formula.
This is helpful for quickly troubleshooting specific sheets in the tracelog. This is also broken out by formula. If there are multiple formulas executing sequentially in a synchronous transaction, then the tracelogs for each formula can include tracelogs for the previous formulas in the chain.
The other way to find tracelogs related to the formula is to navigate to the Tab that contains the Formula Trace Subgrid
In the North52 App you can access a list of all North52 trace logs in the Dynamics instance:
Error Trace Logs
Error trace logs are made available in different ways depending on where the error occurs:
Client Side Errors
Client Side Formula's will throw an error on the screen that gives you information. However, often the most detailed error messages for these are available via pressing F12 on your keyboard and accessing the Console tab within the Developer Tools window.
If you click Show Details and download the log file you can see information like shown below:
You can also access this error message in the Console tab within the Developer Tools window (pressing F12 usually):
In the above example we are trying to show a tab with a name of fake_tab, which doesn't exist, therefore the HideShowTabs() function is failing since it can't make something that doesn't exist visible.
Server Side Errors
Server side errors in Dynamics will throw an error that will appear on screen:
The above is a generic error message that you will see when the Global Tracing Level (in the North52 Configuration record) is set to None. This is designed to be a gentle 'something went wrong' for end users, instead of throwing a full stack trace onto their screen.
Unfortunately the error report generated in the Unified Interface when they download the log file isn't very helpful as it shows a Microsoft stack trace, not a North52 trace log:
Are you able to determine what went wrong from the above error message? There is not enough information in this message - there are 2 steps to help troubleshoot this:
Step 1: Change the North52 Configuration Tracing level
- Go to the North52 Configuration record and set the Tracing Level to Information(Show Exception Details)
- Reproduce the error message following the same steps. This will produce a new error pop up with some more helpful information:
- However Microsoft only allows a tiny visual window to access the error log, so you can copy it out into Notepad and read it there:
- This is a little more readable, but it's hard to copy and paste correctly from the tiny window, and all formatting is lost in the trace log
Step 2: Enable Plugin Tracing from with System Settings
- Navigate to your environment
- In the right hand top corner, click on the cog wheel and select Advanced settings
- From there, go to Settings > Administration > System Settings > Customization and set the Plug-in and custom workflow activity tracing to Exception:
- This means that when an error occurs Microsoft will store the trace log in Advanced settings > Settings > Plugin trace logs:
- When you open the trace log here you can see the entire output in a far more readable state:
- In this case my Formula is attempting to update a field that doesn't exist in the account, the 'faxx' field instead of the 'fax' field
- Finally you can access these plugin-trace logs from within XRMToolBox using the Plugin Trace Viewer by Jonas Rapp
- This will allow you to examine the Plug-in Traces easier than using the viewer in the web client