To view the Aspire debug console, go to http://localhost:50505/aspire after starting up the Aspire server.
You can also access it from the System Admin user interface, using the Debug Console link that appears for every server.
The debug console provides status information and some low-level admin controls for Aspire. Some of these functions can also be performed using the Admin UI.
On this page:
Through the debug console you can:
So you can see, the debug console contains quite a lot of useful functionality.
In general, the debug console is self-documenting. This section will cover some of the inner workings of the interface.
See Changing the Aspire Port Address for information about changing the port address or General Settings for adding a username and password to the debug console.
Every component configured in Aspire has a web page. The web page can be accessed using the component's full name as: http://server:50505/aspire/{component-full-name} (see Naming Components for more details on component names).
The component manager and pipeline manager components contain links to all of the sub-components they contain. The Aspire application component (the component which reponds to the http://localhost:50505/aspire address) also has links to all of the installed applications.
In this way, you can usually navigate to any component by clicking the links from parent components to sub-components.
Components can also receive commands from the admin user interface. Web commands to individual components have many different purposes:
All component commands have a "cmd" parameter which specifies the name of the command to execute. For example, to get the status of a component use:
http://localhost:50505/aspire?cmd=status
Some commands also take additional URL parameters.
In general, it is not necessary to document the component commands, since they should all be available from the System Administration user interface itself.
The following commands are common to all components in Aspire. The format for each command is:
http://server:50505/aspire/{component-name}?cmd={command}&{parameters}
Command | Parameters | Description |
---|---|---|
status | none | Provides status on the command. This provides the same result as navigating to the command in the user interface. |
log | display | Displays the log file for the specified command. For example, http://localhost:50505/aspire?cmd=log&display will display the log file for the Aspire application component. |
log | debug=true | Turns on debug logging. Debug messages can be viewed with the log/display command. |
log | debug=false | Turns off debug logging. |
All commands executed by the System Administration user interface return straight XML to the web browser. You can test this by doing a "view source" on any page in the interface (using Firefox; if using IE9, use the developer tools to see the original XML).
In order to convert the XML to a user-friendly display, the XML is transformed to XHTML and CSS using an XSLT stylesheet. The style sheet is automatically located by the Aspire application and if it exists, it is added as an <?xml-stylesheet> processing command to the top of the resulting XML returned by the component. The web browser will then fetch the XSLT transform and will transform the XML into XHTML for display.
XSL transforms for the debug console are bundled with the Jar file which contains the component code. This increases the portability of components, since the System Administration user interface (i.e., the XSL transform) is included and installed automatically with the component software itself.
However, the Aspire application will first attempt to load the transform from the following directory:
{Aspire Home}/resources/{component-implementation-class}
This is done for user interface development, since it is much easier to edit files in the Aspire Home directory than it is to edit files inside a component Jar file.
For example, if the component's Java implementation class is "com.searchtechnologies.aspire.components.RDBConnectionStage", then the Aspire application will first attempt to load the transform from the following directory:
{Aspire Home}/resources/com.searchtechnologies.aspire.components.RDBConnectionStage
If the XSLT is not in Aspire Home (and it typically is not), then it will then attempt to locate it in the component's Jar file, under the "resources/{component-implementation-class} directory. In this way, most of the components are bundled with the XSL transform used for their administration user interface.
The XSL transform names are the same as the Aspire URL command names, i.e. the command names passed to the "cmd" parameter on the URL.
For example, "status.xsl" is the XSL transform used for all status reports.
If the XSL file for the specific command can not be located, the XSL transform called "result.xsl" will be located. This is the fallback transform used to present the result for most components.
Finally, if no "result.xsl" transform can be located, the XML will be sent directly to the admin user without a transform.