Get More Log Information

As a modeler, you can find detailed logs to analyze an issue before reporting it to AIMMS User Support or on the AIMMS Community.

AIMMS comes with loggers, a logging feature somewhat similar to the log4j technology.

A good tactic for analyzing these logs is to scan for [ERROR] or [WARN]. When an error or warning is related to the issue you are analyzing, check the lines just above it.

Note that the AIMMS log files are designed to be interpreted by AIMMS staff, and their meaning is not always obvious. However, an error or warning message itself does NOT necessarily indicate a problem in the application.

This article provides two files that are templates in creating this information:

  • LoggerConfig.xml This file configures how much output several loggers provide during an AIMMS session.
    You can tailor it to write XML or TXT output.
  • RunWithExtraLogging.bat This is a small utility to start up AIMMS with LoggerConfig.xml activated.

These two files can be downloaded from the link below

Terminology

  1. Logger A logger is a tracing facility built in a software component.

  2. Logger naming A logger is usually named after the component in which it is built. For sub-components, the tracing element is usually named <main component>.<sub component> and so on.

  3. Log level Both a logger and a message have a level associated with it. When the message level is equal to or greater than the level of the logger, it is written to file. Here is the list of log levels used (from low to high):

    1. Trace Typically intermediate results, and indications of where execution is. This output typically requires detailed knowledge of the AIMMS implementation to make sense.
    2. Debug Typically input echo-ing and computed results
    3. Info Summaries of what is computed, such as a matrix size overview.
    4. Warn Exceptions that can be continued from
    5. Error Exceptions that should be handled, by a higher layer in the program, by the modeler, or by the user

    Note

    Levels Trace and Debug can decrease application performance, and do not provide much use to the modeler. Therefore we don’t recommend to enable them unless instructed by AIMMS Support.

  4. Appender There are two appenders available; one to generate TXT files and one to generate XML files. In the configuration file provided, they are both activated. In the next two sections, the corresponding output formats are discussed in more detail.

Using a text editor to analyze TXT log files

Use a text editor to open the log file log/aimms-log.txt.

Some example text:

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2019-12-23 10:12:28,689 0x0000598c [WARN] {AIMMS.Compiler.ceattr.AimmsBCIncidentHandler} "guipro::progress::NextCheck" is not present in the interface of its containing library and therefore cannot be referenced from outside this library.
2019-12-23 10:15:28,986 0x00006358 [DEBUG] {AIMMS.Trace.Procedure} Starting Procedure  MainInitialization
2019-12-23 10:15:28,986 0x00006358 [DEBUG] {AIMMS.Trace.Procedure} Starting Procedure  gss::pr_SeenErrorsAreHandled
2019-12-23 10:15:29,010 0x00006358 [DEBUG] {AIMMS.Trace.Procedure} Finishing Procedure gss::pr_SeenErrorsAreHandled

Selected remarks:

  • Line 1: I referenced the procedure guipro::progress::NextCheck outside the library AimmsProGUI. This error message appeared in the AIMMS IDE as well.
  • Lines 2-4 I have set the level of the logger AIMMS.Trace.Procedure to trace. You can see the message pattern Date{yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss,SSS} ExecutionThread [MessageLevel] {Logger} Message.

Using Log4View to analyze .xml log files

Log4View is a utility to analyze XML log files available at log4view.com. The community edition of Log4View is sufficient to analyze one XML log file at a time.

With the Log4View utility you can filter the output of selected loggers, as shown in the image below.

../../_images/log4view.png

About LoggerConfig.xml

There are three sections in the file LoggerConfig.xml

  • Appenders This section defines how and where the output can be sent to.

    In practice, there are only two appenders used:

    • MyFileAppender A text file appender, which sent output to the local file log/aimms-log.txt.
    • MyXMLFileAppender An XML text file appender, which sents its output to the file c:/temp/aimms-log.xml

  • Loggers

    There are various loggers, and each logger has its own default level.

  • Final configuration

    This section is used to select the appenders to be used. Normally, you’ll just use one, and comment out the other.

About RunWithExtraLogging.bat

To activate the LoggerConfig.xml the command line option --logcfg should be used. You can enter the entire command from the command prompt.

A batch file quickly becomes more convenient, if you do this more than once. Consider the following .bat file:

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echo on

rem Modify this to select the proper AIMMS Version.
rem set AIMMSVERSION=4.70.2.4-x64-VS2017

rem Select the latest AIMMS version
rem Get the latest AIMMS release installed by pushing/popping both drive and path,
rem and then switching to the folder of installed AIMMS versions.
rem Assumption: the users folder is on the C drive.
set DRIVEUSEDATSTART=%~d0%
pushd
c:
cd %localappdata%\AIMMS\IFA\Aimms\
for /f "usebackq delims=|" %%f in (`dir /b `) do set AIMMSVERSION=%%f
popd
%DRIVEUSEDATSTART%

set AIMMSEXECUTABLE="%localappdata%\AIMMS\IFA\Aimms\%AIMMSVERSION%\Bin\aimms.exe"

rem Assuming there is precisely one .aimms file in the current folder,
rem the following command will select that .aimms file and start it with the AIMMSEXECUTABLE selected.
rem Logging is turned on by --logcfg LoggerConfig.xml on the command line.
for /f "usebackq delims=|" %%f in (`dir /b *.aimms`) do %AIMMSEXECUTABLE% --logcfg LoggerConfig.xml %%f

rem Assuming here LoggerConfig.xml still writes to the fixed folder c:\temp,
rem we move the create logfile from this folder to the current folder.
rem Because of this fixed location, we can only debug one AIMMS project at a time!
copy c:\temp\aimms-log.xml log
del c:\temp\aimms-log.xml

pause

Selected remarks about the about this .bat file:

  • The file provided is just a template to be tailored as needed.
  • Line 1: We keep the echo-ing on; such that we can see afterward whether the .bat file worked as expected.
  • Lines 10-16: Search the folder %localappdata%\AIMMS\IFA\Aimms\ for the latest AIMMS installed. For me, this doesn’t work as I still have AIMMS 4.9 installed. That is why I uncommented line 4, and commented out lines 10-16 for the projects I’m working on.
  • Line 23: Here AIMMS is started using the command line option --logcfg. The trick in this statement is that it is applied to every .aimms file in the folder. As there is usually only one such file, this works out nicely.
  • Line 28,29 The XML file appender only writes to a file with an absolute path. Therefore we copy the XML log file to the place it belongs: the log folder of the project.
  • Line 31: By pausing we can see the log in the command window opened. It might be useful to check whether the .bat execution worked properly on your system. You may want to remove this line after a while.

Further reading

Last Updated: July, 2020