A wee while ago Robin Hilliard blogged some log file tips for Flex and ColdFusion (CF). Bring Flex Data Services (FDS) in to the mix and you may actually pull your hair out.
Open neo-logging.xml for editing, here’s a few more tips…
Pop it up
An alternative to running CF in a terminal/console is to enable the ColdFusion Log Console. Change the following to ‘true’ and restart CF to see the java application magically appear.
<var name='consoleVisible'>
<boolean value='true'/>
</var>
If ColdFusion is running as a Windows service you’ll need to tick ‘Allow service to interact with desktop’ in the log on tab in the service properties.
Unix/OSX people, you probably start CF using the parameter -Djava.awt.headless=true. You’ll need to remove it (or set to false) for the log console to appear. Keep in mind that doing so will cause problems elsewhere.
Turn it up
The CF console doesn’t display it’s ‘debug’ level by default. But you can turn it on. Get ready to see all sorts of debugging – datasources, watchers, messages, etc. Which brings me back to FDS – when debug is on you will see the CF Event Gateway messages being converted to Flex messages and vica versa. Very handy. Just change this to ‘debug’;
<var name='priority'>
<string>debug</string>
</var>
It can be helpful to see what’s going on inside. Some samples;
Debug [Thread-15] - Sleeping for 10 seconds before retry
Debug [web-0] - auth:[], apptoken:[cfadmin]
Debug [web-0] - unknown auth info found, executing cflogin...
Debug [scheduler-0] - Watcher::run() Mon May 28 20:12:20
OS it up (I have no idea what that means)
This might be a thing of the past, it doesn’t do a whole lot. ColdFusion can send some log output to the OS. Here’s the part to change;
<var name='enableOSLogging'>
<boolean value='true'/>
</var>
And we’re done with neo-logging.xml. There you have it, no major crowd pleaser’s, just occasionally handy stuff.
Cheers.