Advanced PowerBuilder

Collecting Trace Data - An Easy Way

The easiest way to collect tracing data for the entire application is to enable tracing in the 'System Options' dialog box. If you do not find 'System Options' icon on the Powerbar, select 'Window/System Options' menu option. You may want to add this icon to the Powerbar by customizing the Powerbar.

Turn on all the trace activities you want to capture and specify the trace file. The extension of the trace file may be anything, however, the default prefix PBP is preferred. The clock timer measures time in microseconds and the resolution (the smallest unit of time a timer can measure) can be less than one microsecond depending on the speed of your computer CPU. Thread or process timers measure time in microseconds with reference to when a threaded or process execution started. This type of measuring is good in tracing distributed applications. On windows 3.x machines, the selection of timer has no effect since windows 3.x does not support threading any way. On Unix machines, thread timer is always used which measures time in nanoseconds.

That's all you need to do. Now, run your application. For the example purpose, we ran product_management_system, opened product maintenance screen, retrieved data, added a record, saved the changes & retrieved data gain. Then we closed the window and exited from the application.

The generated trace file is stored in binary format that means you can't view the data with any editor unless you use tracing & profiling APIs. The binary format makes the file compact and gives better performance. Because of the binary format this file is not portable between different operating systems.

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