When opening cases with Technical Support related to using the OpenEdge ABL language or programming issues (crashes, hangs, ABL errors or warnings, etc.) the following may provide a useful checklist in commonly needed information for investigation of an issue.
Not every piece of information described below will be necessary for each case.
This list is meant to suggest commonly needed things for Technical Support problem investigations.
Customer Information
- What is the impact? (For example: Production down, Holding up a release, Enhancement, Question, Inconvenience, etc...)
- How many users / sites are affected?
- Is the problem occurring at one site and no others? What's the difference?
- Startup Parameters
For information on how to find out what startup parameters were used to start an ABL session, see the below articles:
Environment Information
- Progress Product and Component
This information can be found by running <install-dir>\bin\showcfg
- Progress/OpenEdge Version - In most cases it is very important the exact version be provided
For information on how to find the bitness of the OpenEdge installation, see below articles:
- Operating System and its bitness (32/64)
For information on how to find the bitness of the Operating System, see below articles:
- Third Party Products, their Version and Provider
For example
- Java
- Tomcat
- Apache
- IIS
- ActiveX
- .NET Component
- Eclipse
- Visual Studio
- Microsoft SQL Server
- Crystal Reports
- Etc...
Problem Summary
- What is the current vs. expected behavior?
- How often and under what circumstances does the problem occur?
- What recent changes have been made that might or might not influence this behavior?
For example
- Upgraded/Changed Application Code
- Upgraded Progress / OpenEdge Release
- Application Patch applied
- Progress / OpenEdge Patch applied
- OS/3rd Party software/hardware upgrade
- Change in startup/logging/SSL settings
- Change to Startup Parameters or Options
Document the Investigation that has been done thus far
For example
- Can the problem be reproduced in-house?
- Can the problem be reproduced in a test environment vs. production environment?
- What investigative steps/tests have already been performed/taken?
- What documentation, knowledgebase articles, existing issues or community threads were reviewed?
- Is the problem only reproducible by certain users on certain systems?
Information about the origin of the problemProvide any information you can that points to where and when the problem started to occur.
For instance:
- If the issue is happening after an upgrade or otherwise version change, provide the version before the upgrade.
- Where the problem DOES occur and where DOESN'T it occur? What's the difference?
Progress / OpenEdge Specific Questions to ConsiderIn cases that involve Crashes and Hangs see the below knowledgebase articles
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- In cases where there is an error shown on the screen you need to first locate where the error is coming from within the application if possible. The OpenEdge product provides a number of different startup parameters and options that help to isolate where errors come from. These are detailed in the below article
- Most problems that occur leave some sort of information in the Operating System, whether from the Windows Event Viewer or UNIX/Linux system logs, protrace files (generated by Progress), log file output (db .lg), -clientlog output, etc...
- Look in the system that experienced the problem for any files that were generated at the time the error occurred and provide them to Progress Technical Support
