Debugging Alterian CMC / Immediacy Plug-ins

Debugging an Alterian CMC/Immediacy plug-in isn’t that straight forward because when they don’t work there isn’t an easy way for a developer to determine the problem.

In the Editor you generally get an unhelpful pop-up message like this:

Which also means none of the plug-ins will be available for use.

There is an CMC log file that can be viewed by navigating to the following path on your web server.

C:\Program Files\Alterian\CMC 6.2\CMS\Logging\ViewLogFile.xml

But this isn’t as helpful as it may seem because if a plug-in has errors then they won’t generally get logged here or anywhere else it seems.

The other tool you have at your disposal is a special plug-ins page that enumerates the plug-ins installed or throws an error when one has broken.  This error can sometimes lead you to a fix for the problem.

Open Internet Explorer on your web server and navigate to:

http://localhost/_immediacy/editor/plugins.ashx

Note: This will only work locally on the web server, and will return some XML defining the properties for each installed plug-in.