Hi Julius, I asked about best practice a while back, so it's good to see this come up again as I am still trying to get and idea on what "best practice" is with regards to logging.
I agree with avoiding multiple-lines, but there are occasions where this simply isn't possible. These should really only be at the DEBUG level and are probably a candidate to go into a separate log file to avoid cluttering up the main one. I have three other pet hates with logging 1) Log messages which only make sense with the code as a reference. These are simply useless to the support team. e.g. "strThing populated". Really. How very nice. What the heck is "strThing" and why should I care? A better message may be something like "Thing set to 'x' from table 'y'". Every developer should ask themselves "Will this message help or confuse the support team when they see it?" Certainly for the ERROR and INFO levels. 2) Log messages which hide information. "The file could not be found." What file? Where? Do I even know why it was being accessed? The log message should always contain the file path (or meaningful relative path) and the name. The same holds true to other connections don't log "Connection refused", log "Connection to 'xyz' refused". Again, this all about helping the support team. 3) DEBUG is for developers. Higher levels are for the support team and (possibly) client admins. Don't forget! In my experience may developers do and log technical stuff at these higher levels which is just confusing and means the support team cannot do their job and have to push work back onto engineering to decipher. I am more than likely guilty of all 3! Cheers, J. -----Original Message----- From: Julius Davies [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 06 June 2008 05:28 To: [email protected] Subject: log4j best practises Here's a page of what I consider log4j best practises: http://juliusdavies.ca/logging.html Any comments are very welcome! -- yours, Julius Davies 250-592-2284 (Home) 250-893-4579 (Mobile) http://juliusdavies.ca/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
