Debugging Advanced Collections Concurrent Programs

This is a pretty specific post, I’ll make it short and sweet. I was working in R12 Advanced Collections and I was trying to figure out what was going on behind the scenes of a couple collections processes. Specifically, I was trying to figure out what the concurrent program IEX: Send Dunnings for Deliquent Customers does. Walking through the backend database packages that drive the process was not getting me anywhere as the code jumps back and forth all over the place. What I did notice in the code was a logging function, so I traced that, figured out how to turn it on and voila, I had a pretty good log file that really helped me out. So… to turn on logging for this process you follow these steps:

1. Set the profile value: “IEX: Debug Level” to a value lower than 20.
2. Turn on Statement Level logging for your user at the IEX module level. To do this, follow these steps:

• As System Administrator navigate to Help -> Diagnostics -> Logging -> Preferences
• Add a new user to the list (your user), enable logging, set the level to 1-Statement and set the module to iex%.

** Remember that when you are done to come back here and turn off logging. Failure to do so may result in performance problems and a full file system which will not make you very popular with your colleagues. **

3. Run the concurrent request IEX: Send Dunnings for Deliquent Customers

Now, on the backend file system you will have a file named <DBNAME>_<SESSIONID>.IEX. This file will be located in the first directory that is returned for the value of UTL_FILE_DIR (select * from v$parameter where name = ‘utl_file_dir’;). In my case it was in /usr/tmp.

If you’re interested, all logging for IEX is funneled through the package IEX_DEBUG_PUB. I would imagine that other Collections processes follow this same model.