Tracing Your Application

There are several ways of tracing an application. Before you create application traces and work with them, it is important to decide whether to trace your application automatically or manually.

Automatic

Automatic tracing means that you start tracing implicitly when your application starts the first ObjectStore transaction. Tracing is then performed automatically until the application finishes processing.

Advantages of automatic tracing are

• You do not have to change the source code of the application. This makes it easier for you to start working with OPE.
• You measure the complete ObjectStore processing of your application. You do not lose important information on its performance.
• You get a complete and correct history of all pages with persistent data to which your application has access.

Possible disadvantages of automatic tracing are

• The application trace can become very large and the formatting step might take a while.
• A large application trace can contain redundant data you are not interested in. This data can obscure important information that you want to analyze.

Manual

Manual tracing means that you control the starting and stopping of tracing by invoking start and stop methods of the OPE Retriever API within the application. This enables you to trace selected parts of the application.

This chapter tells you how you prepare your application for tracing, and how you display the results of tracing as diagrams. For a detailed description of the control data that you can specify and for additional functions of the OPE Retriever API to control tracing, refer to Defining the Control Data.