BlueDragon Advantage: Complete Error Pages Are Logged

BlueDragon helps with a nagging problem of resolving errors. If you've not otherwise trapped errors (with site-wide error handling, CFERROR, or CFTRY), you know that a page full of information is written to the screen (in both BD and CF). In BlueDragon, though, that entire page of error info--including the dump of variable scopes at the time of the error--is written to a log directory as an HTML page. This is great for doing post-mortem analysis.

Of course, error handling is always more effective, but what if you're dealing with old code, or simply haven't add it yet, or have some other challenge)? When the user gets an error, if they don't print it out or send it to you, you have little to go on.

You may know that in CF, a single line is written to the application.log file indicating the error and a few other tidbits (date/time, threadID, appname, error message). But what about all the other context? Like the query string, or form variables, or session variables in play at the time?

Again, BlueDragon writes not just a single line but the entire page of the error to a log file. Yep, every runtime server or internal server error that shows on the screen to a user is written to a log file. (You can control whether this happens by an Admin console setting.)

This has been a feature of BlueDragon for a couple of years, so is in the 6.1 and upcoming 6.2 release.

For BlueDragon Server and Server JX, the directory name would be something like in C:\BlueDragon_Server_61\work\temp\rtelogs. The Rtelogs refers to "run time error logs".

Since the J2EE edition of BlueDragon involves deploying CFML in a J2EE web app, the error logs are found in the web application's \WEB-INF\bluedragon\work\temp\rtelogs directory.

The location in the .NET edition varies depending on how you have installed the product. Look for a coming technote or the .NET edition's documentation for more details.