At 12:40 AM 6/9/2004, Nicko Cadell wrote:
Another solution is to ignore the main issue.
:-)
A log file using XML format is not appendable. By this I mean that opening an existing file and appending breaks the file format. Therefore we would just say that using the FileAppender in append mode with this file format is not supported. The header is written when the file is opened, the footer when the file is closed. The file cannot be opened and added to. This may not be the most useful position, however in conjunction with a rolling strategy it may work.
Lacking a better solution, documenting this restriction appears to be the most reasonable thing to do, not entirely satisfactory but reasonable.
If you can setup a rolling strategy that rolls the file on startup if it exists then you have a situation where you never need append to the file.
Good point. In my analysis outlined in my previous message, this case was mentally merged into a "rollover", but you are right it is a slightly different case.
Each time the app starts it rolls the current log file out of the way before creating a new file. This will impact the rolling strategies you may be able to select for this file format. You may also end up with a lot of files just containing the header and footer (one per execution) if you aren't logging any messages.
It actually can get worse because rollovers can fail. In case of failed rollover, we skip the rollover and continue appending to the existing log file.
It's a really messy problem, indeed.
Nicko
-- Ceki G�lc�
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