You need to look at ActivateOptions. It is a method on the appender class. I know it affects threshold . I do not know what else.
Below is code I wrote years ago to enable and disable logging in a end user application in which the end user can stop and start the logging multiple times in a session. It is not great code, but it mostly works in a narrow definition of the word works. For what it is worth. I have wrestled with the "write the config to a file issue". I convinced myself that it was not so bad. I have many windows services that use log4Net and I want the administrator to be able to control the amount of tracing/logging and the location of the file and the number of files etc. I wrote an administration program that gathers this info and creates the log4Net config file from skeletal file with %keyword% in it. (I change the %keyword% based on admin input.) I then ship this file to the service via WCF, the service overwrites its own config file which log4Net was monitoring. Not beautiful, but works well and much easier than figuring out all the internals of log4Net. public void ConfigureTrace (TraceLevelType level, string path) { log4net.Repository.Hierarchy.Hierarchy hierarchy; hierarchy = (log4net.Repository.Hierarchy.Hierarchy)(log4net.LogManager.GetRepositor y()); if (level != TraceLevelType.TLT_Off) { if (had_traced_before) rfa.AppendToFile = true; else if (path != null && path != "") rfa.File = path; rfa.ActivateOptions(); hierarchy.Root.AddAppender(rfa); hierarchy.Configured = true; if (level == TraceLevelType.TLT_Normal) rfa.Threshold = log4net.Core.Level.Trace; else rfa.Threshold = log4net.Core.Level.Verbose; LogTrace.Trace(this,"Transport {0} tracing initialized at {1}",ai.ProductVersion, DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.fff")); had_traced_before = true; } else { if (rfa.Threshold != log4net.Core.Level.Off) LogTrace.Trace(this,"Transport {0} tracing terminated at {1}",ai.ProductVersion,DateTime. Now.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.fff")); rfa.Threshold = log4net.Core.Level.Off; } } ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Roy Chastain From: Patrick Shirley [mailto:patrick.shir...@soeidental.com] Sent: Thursday, August 05, 2010 22:28 To: log4net-user@logging.apache.org Subject: Help needed to programmatically set the appender Hi, I'm having trouble figuring out how to programmatically set the appender for a logger at run time. I want my logger to be configured by an XML file to obtain default values but then to dynamically change the appender. I default my logger to this: _log = LogManager.GetLogger("SoeiDental.Logging");//MethodBase.GetCurrentMethod ().DeclaringType XmlConfigurator.Configure(); Where _log is a public static log4net.ILog. Whenever I log, I'm logging using _log.Warn() or _log.Fata(). My first problem is that I cannot see anyway to access or modify the appender used by the logger named "SoeiDental.Logging". I've read through the Configuration chapter of the manual and studied the SDK. Unfortunately the Configuration chapter seemed very focused on configuration using XML file and doesn't cover programmatic configuration of a specific logger instance. Secondly if I resign myself to setting the root logger in this way: log4net.Appender.FileAppender appender = new log4net.Appender.FileAppender(); appender.File = path; appender.AppendToFile = true; appender.Name = "NewLogFileAppender"; appender.Layout = new log4net.Layout.PatternLayout("%date [%thread] %-5level %message%newline"); BasicConfigurator.Configure(appender); It doesn't seem to have any effect. My logging still uses the appender originally specified in the XML file. The way I understand it "SoeiDental.Logging" is a child of the root logger and so whenever I log using this it ought to use all the appenders of its ancestors. At this stage the only thing I can see to do is to have my code write to the .config to modify the "File" parameter but this quite twisted way of doing things, I shouldn't have to write out to file in order to what ought to be possible with code. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks