Log Viewer Tool 

Purpose

The PRT provides the LogViewer tool, which you can use to analyze portal platform log files. This makes it easier to diagnose the errors and problems that occur in a portal platform.

Features

The LogViewer offers four main functionalities:

·        Browse a file system to locate log files

·        View and download log files to a local system

·        Search for specific patterns in a log file or a list of log files present in a directory

·        Error and exception analysis logged in specific files

The functionality that analyzes errors and exceptions is a mechanism based on an Exception catalog, made of a set of Exception files containing:

·        Additional information for the exception

·        Filter information to retrieve the most relevant information from the Java stack trace

Exception Files

Exception files are test files containing the following key word:

Keyword	Description
stacktrace	Returns the exclusion filter used to parse the stack trace. After an exception, you only need to know the relevant stack trace line. For the portal, the Java exceptions are not always relevant. You then specify that you want to exclude them (stacktrace:java,javax) and the first stack trace line starting with anything other than "java" or "javax" will be selected and displayed in the result
message	For this specific error you may want to display a particular message. Simply enter it there. For example: "message: This is the specific message for this exception”
action	You can also add advice referring to this exception. This is the purpose of this keyword. For example: "action: Please contact your system administrator”

Example

The com.sap.portal.testException can be described in the Exception catalog in a file called com.sap.portal.testException.err, which contains the following information:

stacktrace: Message: A test Exception occurs. Action: Check that the test configuration has been set up correctly in the test directory

In that case, since there is no information after “stacktrace”, the keyword can be omitted. This means that the first line of the stack trace will be selected as the correct one (indicating the file, the method and the line where the error occurred). The initial error and message will also be displayed. The message and action will also appear.

All of these values will be displayed in the LogViewer’s help window.