At first I was going to strongly recommend against using a custom level called BUSINESS. Custom levels have been a problem in the past at my work (IMO). Markers are really a perfect fit for this use-case. That got me to thinking about my previous idea on this of adding more levels to Log4j. Please bear with me. Today we have:
OFF FATAL ERROR WARN INFO DEBUG TRACE ALL What I could use today are *these* levels too: OFF *EXIT* FATAL ERROR WARN *HEADLINE* INFO *VERBOSE* DEBUG TRACE ALL (EXIT is called when you System.exit(), which might not be loggable depending on I don't know what, HEADLINE is a lame name but I can't think of anything better, VERBOSE is obvious IMO) Which made me wonder if your BUSINESS level could fit in like this: OFF FATAL ERROR WARN *BUSINESS* INFO DEBUG TRACE ALL So maybe, just maybe, I could see that a BUSINESS level makes sense instead of a marker. Gary On Wed, Sep 16, 2015 at 2:34 PM, Nicholas Duane <nic...@msn.com> wrote: > I was hoping on getting some replies to my last message as I'm trying to > figure out the best way to utilize the existing logging frameworks, > log4j(2) and log4net in our case, to log our business events and ensure the > business events flow to the correct destination. > > I think the two main suggestions were to either use markers or a separate > "well known" logger. > > As I mentioned in the previous message, I was about to write a sample > which used markers just to better understand how they work. The first road > block I ran into is that log4net does not support markers, as far as I can > tell. Now the implementation doesn't have to be the same on both windows > and linux, but that would certainly be a plus if it was. Also, it doesn't > look like markers have been heavily adopted by many logging frameworks. > The one article I read only listed log4j2 and logback. > > In addition, while markers seem like they would be better at indicating > the type or category of event as opposed to using a level, you still have > to define a marker for each type I guess. I could either define a custom > level or a custom marker. Since markers are not available in log4net and > custom levels are, a custom level might work out better for us. > > Using a "well known" logger to log business events seems like a reasonable > approach. And while I don't see any major downsides with going this route, > it seems that a piece of code which is logging using their own logger > should be able to log a business event with that same logger. It was > stated previously that the level indicates the importance of the event and > the logger indicates the types of events, or why someone might want to look > at the events. The example given was some market data code which used its > own logger to log market data information. That seems totally reasonable, > however, it doesn't seem to fit my example. In our case any component can > emit a business event. > > I then thought that maybe I could use the EventLogger, which I think > someone might have mentioned along the way. I was hoping to try that out > also, assuming that allowed me to pass a marker in whatever methods it > exposed. However, I only see a static marker property on the EventLogger > class. > > The other option which I'm considering is exposing a property on my event > object which indicates the category of event. At the moment I have a > "type" property which, of course, indicates the event type. However, this > will be different for every different business event and thus I need > another property which tells me that the event is a "business" event. Then > I was thinking I could write a filter which checks the message object to > see if it's one of my events and if so use the "category" to forward to the > appropriate destination. > > Am I missing any other viable solutions? > > Thanks, > Nick > > > From: nic...@msn.com > > To: log4j-user@logging.apache.org > > Subject: markers > > Date: Tue, 15 Sep 2015 22:25:37 -0400 > > > > > > > > > > I was about to starting writing a sample to see how markers work and to > see if they could be used for logging business events instead of using a > custom level. While I might have mentioned log4net in passing, we're > trying to capture these business events using existing logging frameworks. > The thinking is that we'd use log4net on windows and log4j(2) on linux (no > facade). Ideally the design would be similar across both platforms. That > being said, I'm surprised at how different log4net is from log4j(2). It > appears log4net doesn't support markers. While we don't have to have the > same solution for both platforms, it would be nice if the solutions were > the same or similar. > > > > I also looked at the EventLogger and that class doesn't have any > overloads which take a marker, just a static marker property. I guess the > EventLogger can be assigned only a single marker? > > > > Thanks, > > Nick > > > > > > > > > > -- E-Mail: garydgreg...@gmail.com | ggreg...@apache.org Java Persistence with Hibernate, Second Edition <http://www.manning.com/bauer3/> JUnit in Action, Second Edition <http://www.manning.com/tahchiev/> Spring Batch in Action <http://www.manning.com/templier/> Blog: http://garygregory.wordpress.com Home: http://garygregory.com/ Tweet! http://twitter.com/GaryGregory
