Debugging authentication scripts in Metastorm BPM

I talked previously about how to simplify editing authentication scripts in Metastorm BPM by using the FreeFlow Administrator. What I didn’t talk about was how to debug what is actually going on in your authentication scripts. There isn’t a way to debug these scripts from within Visual Studio, or at least not that I’m aware of, so the only way to debug them is to write some kind of trace statements. This can help clarify which scripts are being executed and what path is being taken through the scripts.

I guess you could just write to a text file but the way I’ve done this in the past is to use the createLogEntry function. This function is provided in most of the authentication scripts supplied by Metastorm and usage of it is as follows.

    var err = new Object; 
    err.eDetectedByMethod = "eLogin()";
    err.eDetails = "logging in via web";
    createLogEntry( err );

This will write an entry to the eLog table. Typically I’ll add something similar to the above code as the first lines in each eLogin method in each authentication script, to see which script is actually being called, then add it where necessary to see why scripts are failing.