Leveraging the Database - Oracle APEX Best Practices - page 42

Instrumentation
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where a user contacts you and reports a
problem, which you can't reproduce on your own environment? What would really
be helpful is knowing how your code was being used, with which values your stored
procedures were called, and which code path the user took to get to the situation
they found themselves in before they contacted you.
There is a way to know all this information, and the way to get it is by properly
instrumenting your code. Instrumenting your developed code means putting in
debug statements throughout. In these debug statements, there should be the
information you need to track the execution of the developed code. Also, it should
be complete with timestamps and other meaningful information.
Tyler Muth has written an excellent utility to help you with instrumenting your
code. This package is called Logger and can be used to instrument your code—not
only your APEX code, but also your database stored procedures. One of the
functions that you can use speciically for APEX is to capture all items and
values from session state.
The Logger package, which was written by Tyler Muth and
is presently available with release 1.4, can be downloaded
for free from http://sn.im/logger1.4 .
Please note that this is a temporary location; at the time of
writing the package was moved to different locations.
When all other approaches fail, you can always search on the
Internet for "Muth and Logger"; undoubtedly you will ind
the current site where this package can be downloaded from.
Inside each of the package bodies that contains the database code, we declare a
global constant as follows:
g_package constant varchar2(31) := $$plsql_unit||'.';