dlog

Simple and modular logging library

[2021-Dec-23 11:17:35.3527637] (source/dlog/testing/thing.d:12): This is a log message

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Usage

We recommend you use dub to add dlog to your project as follows:

dub add dlog

• View on DUB
• View API

Components

dlog is formed out of two main components:

1. Logger
   • The logger contains the needed barebones for facilitating the actual logging of text
2. MessageTransform
   • A MessageTransform is attached to a logger and performs manipulation on the text input into the logger for logging
   • They may be chained as to perform multiple transformations in a stream-like fashion

Quick start

If you want to immediately begin logging text usin the defaults and don't care about implementing your own transformations then you can simply use the default logger as follows:

import dlog;

Logger logger = new DefaultLogger();


logger.log("This is a log message");
logger.log(1);
logger.log(1==1);
logger.log([1,2,3]);

This will output the following:

[2021-Dec-23 11:17:35.3527637]	(source/dlog/testing/thing.d:12): This is a log message
[2021-Dec-23 11:17:35.3527717]	(source/dlog/testing/thing.d:13): 1
[2021-Dec-23 11:17:35.3527789]	(source/dlog/testing/thing.d:14): true
[2021-Dec-23 11:17:35.3527871]	(source/dlog/testing/thing.d:15): [1, 2, 3]

As you can see file and line numbering of where the log() function is called appears in the log message which can be quite helpful for debugging.

Custom loggers

Implementing your own transform

Perhaps the default transformation, DefaultTransform, may not be what you want. Maybe you want the module name included in the logged messages or perhaps don't want the date-and-timestamp included at all. All of this can be up to you if you choose to implement your own message transform.

You will need to start off with a class that inherits from the MessageTransform class and then which overrides the transform method as shown below:

import dlog;

public class CustomTranform : MessageTransform
{
	public override string transform(string text, string[] context)
	{
		string transformed;

		/* Insert code to transform `text` and return the `transformed` text */

		return transformed;
	}
}

Additional information, besides the text being logged itself (this is the string text argument), comes in the form of a string array as string[] context the contents of which are described below:

1. context[0]
   • This contains __FILE_FULL_PATH__ which is the full path (absolute) to the source file where log() was called
2. context[1]
   • This contains __FILE__ which is the path (starting at source/ to the source file where log() was called
3. context[2]
   • This contains a stringified version of __LINE__ which is the line number of the call to log()
4. context[3]
   • This contains __MODULE__ which is the name of the module the call to log() appeared in
5. context[4]
   • This contains __FUNCTION__ which is the name of the function log() was called in
6. context[5]
   • This contains __PRETTY_FUNCTION__ which is the same as above but with type information
7. context[5..X]
   • This contains optional extras that were set when the log() function was called with the contextExtras set
   • Example: log("Hello world", contextExtras=[this])

Creating a Logger

We now need to create a logger that makes use of our message transform, we can do so by creating an instance of the Logger class and passing in our MessageTransform as so:

Logger customLogger = new DefaultLogger(new CustomTranform());

The above is all one needs to be able to pull off a custom transformation.

Custom Logger

Custom loggers can also be created by sub-classing the Logger class and overriding the logImpl(string) method. The reason someone may want to do this is up to them. One easy to think of reason is to perhaps applying filtering of messages to be logged and skip them (as this method is where the I/O of printing out the logs normally happens). Another reason may be to log to a different data resource, the DefaultLogger writes to the file descriptor 0 (stdout), but you may want to log over a socket connection to a remote machine for example, or perhaps do several pieces of I/O for your logging. One can do that with a custom logger, you shoudl see source/dlog/defaults.d for the implementation of a custom logger, such as DefaultLogger.

License

LGPLv2