Debug issues in Unified Service Desk

The debugger application in Unified Service Desk is a hosted control that provides insights into the code executions of the Unified Service Desk platform. It can be used to troubleshoot issues in your Unified Service Desk application.

To enable the debugger, you must create a Unified Service Desk hosted control of Debugger type. The three sample Unified Service Desk applications come preconfigured with a debugger hosted control.

The debugger provides information under the following tabs: Action Calls, Debug Output, and Data Parameters. Additionally, debugger also lets you test the existing action calls and UII actions available in the system.

In This Section

Action Calls tab

Debug Output tab

Data Parameters tab

Test your actions calls and UII actions

Action Calls tab

The first tab in the debugger is the Action Calls tab. Action calls are the primary mechanism by which things occur in Unified Service Desk. Tracking the progress of these, as well as the values used in your replacement parameters, can give you valuable information about your hosted controls.

The following color highlights are used for the records in the Action Calls tab:

• Yellow indicates that an action call didn’t run because a condition failed.

• Red indicates that the condition succeeded but the action failed either due to an exception or because required parameters in the data weren’t replaceable.

  

Debug Output tab

This tab displays a trace listener. If you attached a code debugger to the application, this is the output you would see. It also displays text that will be written to a log file.

Data Parameters tab

This tab displays data parameters that are captured during the execution of the application. The list of available values will change frequently as data is discovered from various ways while the application is used. These data parameters may be used when calling actions, for display, or other purposes in the application by using replacement parameters. System data parameters typically start with “$,” such as “$Global” to help keep them separate from general data parameters. For more information, see MSDN: Replacement parameters in the Unified Service Desk Developer Guide.

You can refresh data parameters by clicking Update data parameters icon. You can also copy the data parameters to your clipboard.

Test your actions calls and UII actions

The debugger also lets you test the existing action calls and UII actions by using different conditions and replacement parameters to experiment, and view results as per your requirement. to display the area where you can test action calls and UII actions, click the down arrow above the Action Calls tab.

• In the Action Calls tab, select an action call from the drop-down list, and click the Run Action Call icon () to view the results of the action call. For more information about testing an action call, see the MSDN: Test the action call for customizing your display section in the topic for customizing a theme in the Unified Service Desk Developer Guide.

• In the Direct Action tab, you can directly call UII actions on hosted controls in the system. This is a useful way of testing out action call configuration before actually creating an action call for the UII action. Replacement parameters can be used in the Data field while testing UII actions. If you have required permissions, you can also create hosted controls and UII actions by clicking the add icons next to the respective drop-down lists. This will display the New Hosted Control or New UII Action page in Internet Explorer based on what you chose to create. For more information about testing a UII action, see the MSDN: Run the Unified Service Desk client to work with custom hosted control section in the topic for creating a custom Unified Service Desk hosted control in the Unified Service Desk Developer Guide.

See Also

Concepts

Sample Unified Service Desk applications
Configure diagnostic logging in Unified Service Desk

Other Resources

Troubleshoot Unified Service Desk using debugger and diagnostic logging
MSDN: Walkthrough 6: Configure the Debugger hosted control in your agent application
MSDN: Hosted control types and action/event reference

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