Good evening Readers. Today’s blog is going to be something different. I am going to tell a story, of sorts.

I came across something in X3 that I forgot existed. Do you ever do that? Like you know about something but forget that its there. Well, that is exactly what happened to me. It was a few weeks ago. I was brainstorming for ideas about blog posts (I try to get a few ideas, so I have backup ideas) I could write. So, I started cruis’n through the application, poking and prodding at stuff, when I noticed something. There was a function that looked familiar but, for the life of me, I could not remember what it did. The name was something where you would look at and be like, “Why am I not using this?” kind of look. At least that is how I saw it.

And there I am, staring at this function, thinking… why don’t I remember this? Why has no one told me about it? Is that really what it does? How long has it existed? Loads of questions come to mind like a tornado of thoughts.  Then I realized I could just write about it. I did not see that anyone else had mentioned it, yet here it is.

Under Development module, tucked away in the Utilities section, is a function called “Log for support”. So, what exactly is “Log for support”. Well its this crazy function that spits out a “log” of all the parameters, function, modules, component versions, active activity codes, and such and drops all that information into a xml file and emails it to someone (if you want it to). More or less, it gives you a huge information dump of the system environment and system variables for X3. This whole info dump could be super useful if you were troubleshooting changes or whatnot. Open that sucker up in Winmerge and compare the two and it will mark the differences for you. I have not dived into how many uses it could hold, but my guess is, there could be a lot.

Here’s how it works:

You’re going to want to login as an admin user and go to Development, Utilities, Miscellaneous, Log for support. It should be in the same place as my screenshot. Although, if you’re on an older version it could be slightly different. Also note, I have no idea if this is there for V6 systems. I wasn’t planning on looking at v6 as its roughly 15 years old and would be like looking for advanced options in Windows XP that only Windows 10 has. So, It’s probably not there.

Once the function loads (it’ll probably take a minute because I bet you never used it) it should only ask for 2 fields to fill in. the first being an incident number, which we don’t care about (put whatever number you want), and an email address. So you can type in any email address. Note the email sent comes from the admin user doing the clicking, as in click the OK in the top right.

If you have the SMTP setup, well… setup, then you should get an email like below. It should also contain an email attachment in XML format.

If you don’t use any sort of SMTP or workflow or email sending stuff with X3, well there is another place to find the information. When request is sent via emails, they are first compiled into a TXT and TRA file for a mode of transportation to the SMTP server. If you don’t have one hooked up to X3, X3 still makes the files. The “M” files (as we call them) are typically found in the endpoint folder’s TMP folder. In the screenshot below you can see where to find the trace files for emails and how they would look. From my picture you can see that my attachment is coming from “C:\Sage\X3ERPV12\Folders\X3…” and the file name is SUPPORT.xml.

So, if I head over to that location and see (its most likely on the application server), I should be able to find it. Just like I did in my screenshot here.

Here is some screenshots of what it looks like

This is the collapsed main sections

And there you go. Some extremely long and useful log file that talks about all sorts of cool information to keep a “log” of. I am sure people will find many, many uses for this. Until next time.