Skip to main content

Debugging a Tridion 2011 Event System

Image
By
OK, so you wrote your Tridion Event System. Now it's time to debug it. I know this is a hypothetical situtation -- your code never needs any kind of debugging ;) but indulge me...

Recently, Alvin Reyes (@nivlong) blogged about being difficult to know how exactly to debug a Tridion Event System. More exactly, the question was "What process do I attach to for debugging even system code?". Unfortunately, there is no simple or generic answer for it.

Different events are fired by different Tridion CM modules. These modules run as different programs (or services) or run inside other programs (e.g. IIS). This means that you will need to monitor (or debug) different processes, based on which events your code handles.

So the usual suspects are:
  • dllhost.exe (or dllhost3g.exe) - running as the MTSUser is the SDL Tridion Content Manager COM+ application and it fires events on generic TOM objects (e.g. events based on Tridion.ContentManager.Extensibility.Events.CrudEventArgs);
  • TcmServiceHost.exe - fires the event that occurs when a Publish Transaction is created;
  • TcmPublisher.exe - fires publishing events based on Tridion.ContentManager.Extensibility.Events.PublishingEventArgs;
  • cm_wf_svc.exe - fires workflow events based on Tridion.ContentManager.Extensibility.Events.WorkflowEventArgs;
  • w3wp.exe - IIS process (not sure is used by Event System);
Tip: if you are not sure which process runs your event system DLL, have a look at the processes that 'use' the DLL (e.g. by using Process Explorer's "Find Handle or DLL..." functionality) and debug those.

Labels:

Comments

Frank said…
TcmServiceHost fires the event that occurs when a publish transaction is created (TcmPublisher then does the transitions to other states).
04 March, 2012 06:35
Mihai Cădariu said…
Thanks Frank. I updated the post to reflect your information.
04 March, 2012 07:30
Nivlong said…
Not so much for Event System debugging, but Dominic Cronin describes how to use PowerShell's gci command to finding the right w3wp.exe process to attach to (for Content Delivery development).

http://www.dominic.cronin.nl/weblog/debugging-64-bit-tridion-content-delivery-on-iis-7.5-1/blogentry_view#1357182811077846
03 January, 2013 03:14
RobertC said…
In Tridion 2013 we need to attach to the TcmServiceHost, even if we are listening to ComponentSave events.
03 July, 2013 14:34
Mihai Cădariu said…
Yup... COM's gone! COM's gone... :)
03 July, 2013 17:43
Unknown said…
Hi,
I have implemented the Workflow using core-service in Tridion 2011. and i was able to debug the code by attaching the process "cm_wf_svc.exe". recently the Tridion version is being upgraded to 2013 and the Workflow is working fine, but now if i am trying to debug the code by attaching the process "TcmWorkflowAgent.exe", the execution is not stopping at the breakpoint and i am not able to Debug the code. can you please help me on this
02 September, 2013 10:49
Paige W said…
Thanks for a great read
17 October, 2024 12:24
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Running sp_updatestats on AWS RDS database

By
Part of the maintenance tasks that I perform on a MSSQL Content Manager database is to run stored procedure sp_updatestats . exec sp_updatestats However, that is not supported on an AWS RDS instance. The error message below indicates that only the sa  account can perform this: Msg 15247 , Level 16 , State 1 , Procedure sp_updatestats, Line 15 [Batch Start Line 0 ] User does not have permission to perform this action. Instead there are several posts that suggest using UPDATE STATISTICS instead: https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/145982/sp-updatestats-vs-update-statistics I stumbled upon the following post from 2008 (!!!), https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/186e3db0-fe37-4c31-b017-8e7c24d19697/spupdatestats-fails-to-run-with-permission-error-under-dbopriveleged-user , which describes a way to wrap the call to sp_updatestats and execute it under a different user: create procedure dbo.sp_updstats with execute as 'dbo' as...
2 comments
Read more

REL Standard Tag Library

By
The RSTL is a library of REL tags providing standard functionality such as iterating collections, conditionals, imports, assignments, XML XSLT transformations, formatting dates, etc. RSTL distributable is available on my Google Code page under  REL Standard Tag Library . Always use the latest JAR . This post describes each RSTL tag in the library explaining its functionality, attributes and providing examples. For understanding the way expressions are evaluated, please read my post about the  Expression Language used by REL Standard Tag Library . <c:choose> / <c:when> / <c:otherwise> Syntax:     <c:choose>         <c:when test="expr1">             Do something         </c:when>         <c:when test="expr2">             Do something else         </c:when...
2 comments
Read more

Publish Binaries to Mapped Structure Groups

By Unknown
Today's TBB of the Week comes from the high demand in the field to publish binary assets to different mapped Structure Groups. By default SDL Tridion offers two ways of publishing binaries: All binaries publish to a folder defined in your Publication properties; All binaries rendered by a given template publish to a folder corresponding to a given Structure Group; In my view, both cases are terrible, over-simplified and not representing a real use-case. Nobody in the field wants all binaries in one folder and nobody separates binary locations by template. Instead, everybody wants a mapping mechanism that takes a binary and publishes it to a given folder, defined by a Structure Group, and this mapping is done using some kind of metadata. More often than not, the metadata is the TCM Folder location of the Multimedia Component. I have seen this implemented numerous times. So the solution to publish binaries to a given location implies finding a mapping from a TCM Folder to a...
10 comments
Read more