IPS Data Upload Utility for Migration - Part 4

Last part of this series is about troubleshooting mechanism in IPS data upload utility. As a migration utility it should have a quality logging mechanism to capture the errors details, data quality issues if any, success or failure message, migration time duration details, etc.

Troubleshooting mechanism

Log files

Any migration utility should have a good logging mechanism to support validation. IPS produces log files for each & every run. This log files will report all the success, failures and warning for each data line in the input file. The log file is stored with file extension as .log.

When a failure or warning is encountered, additional information about the event is also logged into the log file. Log files also lists the configuration setting that were set during the run. The default configuration options used as per the mode is also listed which can help users to debug in case of issues.

Repeat file

Repeat files are generated if any error or failure is encountered in the run. This repeat file will contain the line(s) from the input dat file where an error was encountered. The repeat file is stored with file extension as .rep.

The repeat file can itself be used as input file. It contains the header used in input data file and the failed lines.

Debugging

In some remote cases, where an error being encountered is complex or not reported, it may

be useful to have further detailed information. In this instance, a system log (.syslog) is

generated and automatically stored, typically, in the %TEMP% folder location on Windows.

In order for the syslog file to provide meaningful information, it is important the

accompanying .pdb file (Microsoft program debug database) exists in the same location as

the IPS_DATA_UPLOAD executable. This is only required on the Windows platform.

Low level debugging information can also be generated when the utility is run providing a

trace of the operation of the utility. The following environment variables should be set in the

sourced Teamcenter Engineering environment the utility is running in and takes the format:

DEBUG_MAX=MAX
DEBUG_FILE_NAME=<filename>

For example, on Windows use:-

C:\>SET DEBUG_MAX=MAX
C:\>SET DEBUG_FILE_NAME=c:\debug.log
C:\>Run upload

Field Validation

Field Validation is used to validate that fields and values line up correctly in the data file. It will write a report for each line required, the default is one line, providing a list of <FIELD

NAME> : <FIELD VALUE> pairs and will indicate if there are fields without values specified

or values without fields specified.

Field validation is turned on with the DATA VALIDATION configuration option or the

–validation=n argument. The number of data lines to be validated can be specified and

these lines can optionally be imported.

By default the validated data lines will not be imported, but the configuration option DATA

VALIDATION IMPORT or the command line argument –validation_import can be used to

turn on import. In which case each validated line will also be imported.

Any errors encountered during the import, along with the normal import output will also be

written to the validation report file.

The name of the validation report file is <data_file>_field_report.txt.