Diagnostic snapshot

The Diagnostic snapshot feature can be useful for troubleshooting problems that arise when an expected element doesn't appear in the model that is expected to appear at a particular instance in time. Whilst the business object is running if Blue Prism fails to find a particular element the Diagnostic snapshot can take full capture the all the details of every single ui feature that Blue Prism can identify. This can help build a picture of the state of the application when the element couldn't be found.

Usage

The diagnostic snapshot feature works for the Browser, Windows, and Java, application types. To use diagnostic snapshots you must first turn on the feature for your business object. Within the application modeller window select the root node in the application model, and press the Diagnostics ... button. After clicking the button a dialog will appear allowing you to select one of the available snapshot methods, for Windows and Java there is only one option labelled Snapshot for The Browser application type, there are the options HTML Snapshot and Source Capture. Make sure at least one checkbox is checked and click OK.

With the feature enabled you can right click any element within the application model which corresponds to a ui feature. Right clicking the element will display a context menu in which there will be there will be a Create Snapshot on Error menu item. Selecting the menu item will check or uncheck a checkbox next to the menu item.

When stepping through an object, if the application manager fails to identify any checkboxed elements it will now take a snapshot of the entire model and dump the snapshot text into the logs. In the case of the browser application type it will also dump a source capture of the HTML if that option was chosen.

Output

The output of the snapshot can be viewed by opening the business object logs within system manager

The format of the snapshot text uses tab indentation to denote the tree structure of the elements, followed by a single line of attribute value pairs.

The format of the HTML snapshot is chunks of HTML embedded within an XML document. The HTML Snapshot text is intended to be sent via email to the Blue Prism development team and with an accompanying tool in BPDiagnostics the development team can use this capture file to re-create customer web pages for off-site integration testing.

Take Now

This feature allows you to create snapshot text or source capture text immediately based on the current application state. Within the application modeller window select the root node in the application model, and press the Diagnostics ... button. After clicking the button a dialog will appear allowing you to select one of the available take now buttons. Pressing the button initiates a snapshot or source capture of the application in its current state. The snapshot text will be presented in a pop up dialog.