The TRACING attribute only controls how the "Tracing Data" section is populated. TRACING specifies a comma-separated list of procedure or class and line number pairs. The setting provides a quick way to find out timing data about specific lines in an ABL application. Because TRACING has a performance impact, Progress does not recommend enabling it in production systems.

Data type: CHARACTER

Access: Readable/Writable

Applies to: PROFILER system handle

The initial value is an empty string ("").

Each element in the list is procedure-name|line-number where procedure-name is the name of an external procedure (not an internal procedure) and line-number is the debug listing line number of the statement to be traced. The list elements are separated by commas. For example:
"test1|32,test2|17"

If TRACING is set to an empty string (""), then the only tracing information that is recorded is what is specified by the PROFILER:TRACE-FILTER attribute.

Set the TRACING list before turning on profiling (that is, before setting PROFILER:PROFILING=TRUE).

Redundant entries in the PROFILER:TRACING are automatically removed.

Separate timing data is generated for each ABL statement specified. Therefore, if your statement is within a loop, your output file will contain a line of timing data for each executable statement of each iteration of the loop.

CAUTION: Tracing can significantly slow down the AVM execution.

See also

TRACE-FILTER attribute