Re: logging http session identifying information

[Mark Womack]

If I understand correctly, you want to set session/user specific information 
per request?  Since the MDC is stored in ThreadLocal, I think you will need 
to use a servlet filter to set and unset the MDC for each request.  And yes, 
how threads are assigned to handle requests, etc is very container specific. 
So, setting and unsetting the MDC with each request is a good thing.  I 
cannot remember offhand if there is already an MDC related servlet filter in 
the log4j-sandbox.  You might want to take a quick look and use it as an 
example.

-Mark
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mark Lybarger" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <log4j-user@logging.apache.org>
Sent: Wednesday, May 18, 2005 5:47 AM
Subject: logging http session identifying information

I'm looking for a method to log http session information in our log4j
logging. we want to be able to trace logging to a particular session. For
instance, when a user reports having trouble, we would like to see what they
did on the web site.
We have a thread id being logged with each log, but there's no way to tie
the threads together into a session of activity. I've also read that it's
very container specific as to weather or not the same thread is used for an
entire servlet execution.
I came across this note on using MDC for logging session information.
http://ulc-community.canoo.com/snipsnap/space/Contributions/Integration+Snippets/Log4J+MDC+Integration
It seems rather easy to extend to support any http session attributes that i
might want to log (user id, etc).
Are there other methods to easily log a session id or other information in
our log4j logs? Are there drawbacks to the solution of using the MDC
integration?
One thing that wasn't very clear with the MDC integration was where to put
the setup code in an servlet container environment. We're using a startup
servlet in all our web apps. Would we need this in each web app's startup
servlet?
Thanks!
~mark

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