Collapse All in the Flow Trace

With more complex BPM and/or BPEL processes, debugging the flow trace can be kind of slow. However, if you know what you are looking for, there might be a trick to help you get where you want to be quicker.

The flow trace can be very long and scrolling through it, or even scrolling all the way to the end can take quite some time. But there is a right mouse menu if you click the icons on the left. So if you mouse click the mediator we see, called ‘RequestHandler’, there will be a popup menu: 

If you select the ‘Collapse All Below’ option in the menu, it will as you might expect, not only collapse the mediator, but it will collapse all the children and their children. Meaning, once collapsed, you can expand them one by one, going to the correct subprocess where you want to be. 

This means, in complex processes, you can get to where you want to be a lot quicker, because the flow trace performance a lot better with all the items collapsed.  

Auto Search in the Enterprise Manager through bookmarks

Since 12c when debugging or looking at flow instances in the Enterprise Manager, we have to use the search button to make the flow instances appear. By default the following text is being displayed: 'Conduct a search to display the list of message flows across SOA composites in the SOA Infrastructure'.

When you open the search bar on the right pane and click search, the instances of the last 24 hours are being displayed:

However, there is also a shortcut on this same search pane to 'Generate a bookmarkable link':

If you press this button, a pop-up will be displayed and the generated link will be selected:

Looking at the link, you can see that it holds URL parameters to open the flowInstancesTab and execute the search query. If you copy this link, and paste it in your browser, you will see that it opens the corresponding tab, and start fetching the data:

This means that if you bookmark the URL, from now on you are only one click away from going into the Enterprise Manager, navigating into the flowInstances tab and query the search results:

Switch the Audit Level to Development mode

With JDeveloper 12c it is now possible to run your SOA Suite against the Integrated WLS. However, by default the Audit Level of this server is Production mode which means you do not get to see details when looking at the flow trace of your service.
If you do not change your running mode, the flow trace window will look like this:

We will switch the Audit Level of your local SOA domain to Development mode, to get more info in the flow trace. Right click on your soa-infra, go to the SOA Administration and select the Common Properties:

Change the Audit Level to Development and click Apply:

You do not need to restart your server after this. However, you do need to test your service again. Test your service and again go to the flow trace, the result should now look like this:

You can now press the ‘View Payload’ to see the payload of your transformation: