Part I – Overview of the Improved UI
Part II – How to Find Your Way
Part IV – ClickOnce Installation Log
Part V – M3 Transaction Time Measurements

Two of the new features in the improved UI are the side-panels with categories to the left and facts to the right.

The Basic Facts

Every time the selected session changes, relevant support information are extracted and presented in the Fact area, e g Smart Office version, launch method, Windows related version, feature details, languages timeouts etc. The basic facts often needed in a support case.

To compare fact value changes between sessions in the log file, you select the full log file in the session selector.  This will list duplicate facts one for each session.

A click on a listed fact will scroll the originating log line into view and select it. The context menu on a selected fact reveals more options that may help you further.

Copy Value

Copy puts the presented value into the Windows Clipboard.

Copy Matches to Clipboard

Copy the log entries from where the fact was extracted into the Windows Clipboard.

View External

Show the log entries from where the fact was extracted in the Windows associated text viewer.

Browse

Browse is enabled if the fact value is an URL and the user is allowed to launch external applications in Windows according to the Smart Office settings. It will launch the URL in the Windows associated browser application.

Open file location

Open file location is enabled if the fact value is an existing file path and the user is allowed to launch external applications in Windows according to the Smart Office settings. It will launch the Windows File Explorer and show the folder.

 

I’ve got a recurring set of log entries I often look for

You can create a category in the category area that will collect the log entries that match any of the aspects defined. If you’re a feature or SDK application developer you can create a category that matches the origin i e the namespace of your assembly. Some entries may appear more than once in the result if many aspects matches.

Select one or many log entries that is representative for the category you wish to create and click on Create Category from in the context menu, it will open the category definition dialog with the values from the selection added as options for the category definition.

Select a category Section from the list of existing ones or type a new section name. Name the category in the Header field. Minimize the number of matching values to get fewer more relevant matches. All log entries that contains ANY of the aspects defined will be part of the category.

Press Save button and you will have your category in the left side-panel for quick content selection.

Launch the Log Viewer targeting a specific feature or SDK application

You can create a Shortcut with a parameterized link on the Canvas to launch the Log Viewer on specific content, for debugging scenarios or targeting a specific feature or SDK application. The base launch link for the Log Viewer is:

internal://log

Add a free-text search parameter to start with all entries matching the search criteria, in this example all entries related to user idle detection.

internal://log?search=idledetect

This can be extended with a session parameter to specify the initial session to select in the log. It can be a value [1..n], last will select the current session, prev will select the previous session and full selects the whole log file. Previous is useful if you examine something that happens during shutdown and you examine the log after a restart.

internal://log?search=idledetect&session=2
internal://log?search=idledetect&session=last
internal://log?search=idledetect&session=prev

and you can of course specify a category as initial selection e g your custom category

internal://log?cat=service unavailable
internal://log?cat=service%20unavailable
internal://log?cat=service unavailable&session=full

Finally you have a sessiontime parameter that may be useful in some special cases. If the sessiontime parameter is present, the session parameter is ignored.

internal://log?search=idledetect&sessiontime=13:10