New System Log Console Is A Step In The Right Direction

Debugging is one of the areas that I feel the Force.com platform needs the most work. Currently, there are two ways of debugging on the platform. The first consists of having a second browser window open that displays a logging console. It displays logs for events happening at runtime, like triggers, workflow, and validation rules, but no future methods. To see future method logging, you must use the second method of debugging. To do that, you must go to the Debug Logs area in the Setup section of your Salesforce.com org, and request logs for your user to be recorded. Once you set up your user to record logs, you can go and execute your code, come back to the Debug Log screen, hit refresh, and you should see some new log files that contain information on all the events that were recently executed by you, including future methods. 

If all of this isn’t painful enough, there is still no way to see what code is executing at each point in the logs. You have to find the method name and the line number, then go back into your code and try to track down where the problem is. Needless to say, I was very excited to see a blog post on the Developerforce website with a sneak peek at a new System Log Console.

The new console has some much needed features like the ability to click a line in the execution log, and have it display where it is in the code when that line is logged. You also get a much more readable format and the ability to add and remove components to suit your needs. 

Since this is a pilot feature, you need to request it to be activated from Salesforce.com. Once you have a Summer 10 Preview org, you can contact Salesforce.com and have them activate this feature for you. 

Even though you still do not have access to the most desired debugging features such as, real-time debugging and debugging in Eclipse, I feel it is a big step in the right direction.