Managing Exception Logs

When a program exception occurs, MicroStation appends technical details of the exception to the Exception.log file and writes a binary MiniDump.dmp file. By default, MicroStation maintains a history of the last 20 program exceptions in the ManageExceptionLogs.vbs file.

Both the Exception.log file and MiniDump.dmp files provide valuable information to Bentley for diagnosing the cause of program breakdowns. The information recorded contains, but is not limited to, details such as CPU register values, call stack history, loaded DLLs and MDL applications. An exception log can generate approximately 150K bytes in the Exception.log file and 80K bytes to the MiniDump.dmp file. After generating these files, MicroStation attempts to launch an external process to operate on these files. Normally, there is no need to customize this process. However, there may be circumstances where a CAD manager might want additional processing to be performed. For example:

Sending an exception notification e-mail to the CAD Manager or CAD support staff
Centrally harvesting exception information from workstations to servers
Notifying in-house software developers that their applications are failing

Note: Since MiniDump.dmp is a snapshot of MicroStation's process memory, the size of the file can vary widely based on the setting of $(MS_MiniDumpType) and the amount of virtual memory consumed by MicroStation at the time of the fault. The valid hexadecimal values for MS_MiniDumpType are those accepted by the Windows API function MiniDumpWriteDump. In practice, there are two useful values:

Value	Description
4 (default)	records minimal exception information
7	records the full user mode address space of MicroStation