I’m not totally sure what I’m asking for, so I’ll describe my problem first.
I have builds that involve thousands of actions - one currently is topping 11,000. For even medium sized builds, I find the little “Build log” tab not enough - it takes forever to find the cause of the problem. And because it’s sequential (ie, if there’s an iterator with 10 items performing 3 actions each time, you end up with 41 steps), it’s really hard to get a quick feel for “what happened in this build”.
OTOH, immediately after a build, when you still have the green, yellow and red boxes in the Design tab indicating how many times each step got called, it’s very easy. Mentally, you know “where” the problematic action is, so you just go straight there. You know what it was supposed to to: be skipped, run 4x etc. So this is a very handy view.
Trouble is, you only get that “post mortem” view immediately after the event. If you do anyting else, like execute a single action, close FB, go home (shudder), you lose it. And you can’t get it back.
So, I guess I’m asking for a way of restoring the post mortem view after the event, or some much fancier way of browsing old logs. I want to be able to point to a single line in my script and know quickly “was this run last time? how many times? what was the output each time? when was the last time this failed?” etc.
–
Oh, and while I’m at it, could the Build History be a bit more verbose about what type of run it was - I want to know:
- where was the run started (from the very first action, or somewhere on another action list)
- where/ did it stop (user intervention,
I’m looking at a pile of logs, and it’s very hard to tell the difference between a “build” that was actually just me executing a single instruction, and something more substantial than that. And when you abort a build, the tick mark (“successful build”) is very misleading…
Steve
Hi Steve,
Thanks for these great suggestions.
For now, have you checked out and used all of the following features:
1) Right click on an Action in an Action List and choose "Filter Log by Action".
2) Right click on an entry in an "incomplete" build (Show All Error Actions, or a filtered log) and choose "Show in Context".
3) Click on an entry in a build and the respective action is highlighted in the action list.
Regards,
Angus
- I’ve tried the filter log by action but have never achieved much success with that. In this particular case (loading a log the day afterwards) it said it couldn’t find that action. I still prefer the way a different product I worked on worked: every action had a view which was a list of times it had been called, with the results of each one and links to relevant stuff.
2) Ah yeah, ‘show all error actions’ I should use that more.
3) Really? Heh. How do you choose which instance of the action to show in the log? Could the reverse also take place?
I’ll try using these more in the future and see if they solve my problem.
Steve
Sorry, Steve. I should have been clearer. The automatic highlight-on-click works when you click an action in the build log, and want to see it in the action list.
“Filter Log by Action” does require that you have a log open before you use it - double-click on the log of choice in the Build History tab before choosing it. If no build is yet loaded, it should load the most recent build.
If you “Filter Log by Action” and the action was run more than once in the build, you’ll see all of the instances in the Build Log frame. If you want to see one of these instances “in context”, select it and choose “Show In Context”.
- Angus
Ah, thanks for clearing that up. I look forward to the day when the log pane can be detached and made into a separate window. I finally have dual monitors at work, and it would be great to have the log on one monitor (at full height!) and the action list on the other.
Steve