Some random thoughts...
I agree that relying on XML would be a big limitation on the viewers
usefulnes. Maybe it would be possible to have a parser which takes as
argument a description of the log format (single line per entry), and
then parses an input stream according to that format, ignoring lines
which doesn't match.
The format description could simply be the PatternLayout conversion
pattern. For example, a pattern like "[%t] %-5p - %c{2}: %m%n"
unambigously specifies how to parse a String, I think. Of course it's
possible to write conversion patterns which doesn't have that property,
but that can be dealt with.
The most important case where log entries span multiple lines (XML
formatted log files not included) would be when exceptions are logged.
Most (all?) log4j appenders which log exceptions do so after logging the
message it relates to. A really clever parser might look ahead to see if
a stack trace was following a line, and if so, parse it (maybe just as
one String) and pass it up to the viewer along with the log entry it
"belongs to".
Anders
Aaron Smuts wrote:
>
> xml would boat a log file and put too much overhead on the system. I'd
> rather parse a text file without a bumch of tags. It would be nice to view
> it as plain text without a xml parsing layer and to be able to view in a
> browser. I only use xml in last resort situations.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jim Moore [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Thursday, May 24, 2001 11:17 PM
> To: 'LOG4J Developers Mailing List'
> Subject: RE: log viewer
>
> Suggestion: If you spit everything out in XML with a "Thou shalt use this
> DTD to use this viewer" then you don't have to worry about various formats
> and you can use any of the awesome XML tools (eg. Xerces, Cocoon, etc.) to
> transform it any way you like easily. Transformations from XML are so
> simple that it even works if your appender is an XML file and you use a
> simple "tail" type program that transforms the elements to something more
> appropriate for a human to watch.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Aaron Smuts [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Thursday, May 24, 2001 10:32 PM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: log viewer
>
> I built into a logger that I was using for a while ( one similar to log4j )
> a nice servlet log viewer and sorter. Weblogic also has a nice log viewing
> interface. If log4j had a good, clean log viewer that could sort and
> filter, it would have every feature possible. The difficulty is in making a
> sorter that would be able to read multiple formats. Some set of format tags
> could be identified for rough date, category and level sorting. A browser
> interface would be ideal. I'm thinking about having my team build one
> along witht he jms-rendezvous appender ). It would be a nice additon. . .
>
> Aaron
>
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