An intermediate file is an open document or a file on disk that an application generates as part of generating a response to a request. The application can make subroutine calls to save such files and documents to the transaction archive for debugging purposes. When a subroutine call is made, the file or document is only saved if the application log setting for the application allows writing INFO and higher level entries to the application log.

An intermediate file can be any file used in processing the request, including the XML document created by a content pipeline as part of a publishing operation, a text file passed as input to a third-party tool, and so forth. Intermediate files are only saved if the application running on the Arbortext PE server explicitly saves them, so developers must decide when a file is worth saving and take steps to do so.