All logs created by PowerDesktop can be opened in a log viewer.

To open the application log, which lists all logged job events and application errors, open the Dashboard’s View menu and select Application Log….
To view a job’s log, right-click it in the Job Manager and select View Log… from the context menu.
To open an application or job log saved as a LOG file, open the Dashboard’s File menu and select Open > Log File….

Log Window

Toolbar

When viewing the application log or a job log, a toolbar is displayed at the top of the window with the following buttons.

Refresh: Reloads the log with the latest entries.
Delete: Visible only when viewing the application log, this button opens a drop-down menu with the following options for deleting log entries:
- By Log Level…: Opens the Delete Log Entries dialog, from which you can select one or more log levels for deletion.
- All Entries: Removes all entries from the log.

After deleting a significant number of log entries, you can shrink the log database by enabling the option Rebuild databases at next startup to reclaim free space and restarting PowerDesktop.

Export: Opens a drop-down menu with options for saving log entries to a LOG file. Selecting either of the following menu items opens the Save Log to File dialog, which allows you to specify the name and destination of the exported data.
- All Entries…: Export all entries from the current log, regardless of any filtering.
- Filtered Entries…: Export entries matching the current filter. If no filters are being applied, this item is disabled. To learn how to filter entries, see Filtering.

LOG file content is compressed and cannot be read in a text editor like Notepad. To view the contents of a LOG file, go to the Dashboard’s File menu and select Open > Log File….

Log Entry Grid

All entries in the log are listed in a grid with the following columns:

Timestamp: Date and time the event was logged.
Level: See Logging Levels.
Message: Description of the event.
Error: Exception message if the event was triggered by an exception.

To view an entry in full, double-click anywhere in its row to open the Log Entry Details dialog.

Logging Event Levels

All logging events are assigned an event level, which is compared to the Minimum Level setting in Options to determine whether the event will be written to the log. By default, an event is logged only if its level is Information or higher.

PowerDesktop currently logs events with the following levels, which are listed in ascending order:

Verbose: Used exclusively for logging requests and responses for API calls to external services (e.g., a DMS).
Debug: An event related to the state or progress of an internal operation. Primarily used to troubleshoot unexpected behavior.
Information: An important application or job event, e.g., starting/exiting the application, progress/results of a job step.
Error: An event related to an application exception or server error.

Enabling verbose logging can lead to significant disk usage when processing large import or export jobs and should only be used when troubleshooting an issue with the help of a support engineer.

Sorting

When viewing the application log, entries are listed from latest to oldest by default. For job logs and LOG files, the default order is chronological.
To order all entries by a column’s data, click its header once to sort in ascending order or twice for descending. To sort by additional columns, hold Shift while clicking each header.

Filtering

To filter the log by the values in a column:

Position the cursor over a column’s header and click the funnel icon on the right-hand side.
Select one or more values or add a text filter.
Click Close.

After applying a filter, a filter bar is displayed at the bottom of the grid.

To remove the filter, click the red X on the left-hand side of the bar.
To modify the filter in the Filter Editor, click the Edit Filter button on the bar’s right-hand side.