One of the things you can do when running uDig is enable tracing. At a technical level tracing is enabled by the presence of a .options file in the runtime folder.

Related:

• 10 Running the Main Application

Tracing when Launching from Eclipse

Start by following the instructions here (on running uDig by hand):

• 10 Running the Main Application

Have a look at the Trace tab:

1. Enable the Trace checkbox
2. Place a check next to each plugin you are interested in getting logging messages for
3. for each plugin with tracing enabled you can check to see if there are any sub categories that interest you
4. Press Run
   

When you run the application (with -consoleLog) you can check that the .options file is loaded:

Tracing in the Field

You can also enable tracing by dropping a .options file into a runtime folder; this is really handy when asking a user for more information.

Here is the .options file generated above.

#Master Tracing Options
#Thu Jan 17 08:11:20 PST 2008
net.refractions.udig.render.wms.basic/debug=true
net.refractions.udig.render.wms.basic/debug/render/trace=true
net.refractions.udig.catalog.wms/debug=true
net.refractions.udig.catalog.wms/debug/request=true

To trace a normal uDig install:

1. Create a .options file with the above lines; and email it to the user having the problem
2. Ask them to copy the .options file into their uDig directory
3. Review the logs
   • Open Help > About
   • Click on Configuration Details
   • Click on the View Error Log button - it will open the log using a system editor such as notepad

You can email these files to users with instructions to drop them into their udig directory.