WIMS technical documentation

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Debugging methods

We list here some debugging methods of an administrative module.

• You can add anywhere in a module file writen in wims language (this excludes for instance shell files) a line starting with the command !debug , followed by a string that may contain variable names (preceeded by a $ sign) to get their values. For instance :
  !debug The score of $user is $score
  If the program execution tries to execute such a line, it will stop there, displaying an error message containing your string with the variable names replaced by their values. In the above example, the program displays for instance a debugging message containing
  The score of Ted Watson is 7
• All files and line numbers processed when we issue a wims command can be stored for debugging purposes in a special file named trace.txt in the tmp/sessions/XXXX directory where XXXX is the session number. This debugging trace is in action each time the wims command is executed from a server administrator IP and the debug mode is enabled (it is then written tmp_debug=yes in log/wims.conf). You can add a tmp_debug_var variable to the log/wims.conf file and assign to it the space-separated list of variable names whose evolution you want to know when running the program. You can also add a tmp_debug_use_var variable to the log/wims.conf file and assign to it a space-separated list of variable names: each time one of these variables is used, its value is put in the debugging trace.
• When the server is configured to be in debug mode, peripheral software error messages are displayed at the bottom of the html page.