Epicor 9 Tracing Introduction

Epcior 9 has a debugging feature called Tracing. Because Epicor 9 is based on on a DNA archictecture (distributed internet archictecture), all requests from the Epicor client are first translated into an XML document, and the submitted to the business layer through a web service call. See Introduction to Microsoft DNA for a good explanation of this architecture.

To turn on tracing, in Epcior client, to to Options, Tracing Options...

As a developer, you can see exactly what is being sent. The trace example below was generated when saving an address change for a user:

<tracePacket>
 <businessObject>Epicor.Mfg.BO.UserFile</businessObject>
 <methodName>Update</methodName>
 <returnType>void</returnType>
 ...
 <parameters>
  <parameter name='ds' type='Epicor.Mfg.BO.UserFileDataSet' ><UserFileDataSet xmlns="http://www.epicor.com/Mfg/100/BO.UserFile/UserFile">
  <UserFile>
    <XUserID>neilc</XUserID>
    <Name>Neil</Name>
    <Address1>123 Raccoon Holow</Address1>
 ...
  </UserFile>
  <UserComp>
    ...
  </UserComp>
</UserFileDataSet></parameter>
 </parameters>
 <paramDataSetChanges>
  <paramDataSet name='ds' useDataSetNbr='0' >
   <changedValue tableName='UserFile' rowState='Modified' rowNum='0' colName='Address1' ><![CDATA[123 Raccoon Hollow]]></changedValue>
   ...
  </paramDataSet>
 </paramDataSetChanges>
</tracePacket>

Because of the common naming convention across Epicor's namespace, I can infer from the Epicor.Mfg.BO.UserFile business object with method Update, that the following things exist:
* a table in the database called "UserFile", whose non-logic fields match parameters in UserFileDataSet
* a web service called UserFileService, with method Update