Comment #6 on issue 456 by pekka.klarck: When logging messages through
stdout timestamps are not accurate
http://code.google.com/p/robotframework/issues/detail?id=456
I've been thinking this a bit more and believe adding support for embedding
the timestamp to the message (option 2) in my previous comment) is enough.
The implementation is so much easier than trying to add timestamps
automatically and a single implementation would support all library types
including remote libraries.
I think a good way to specify the time is using epoch time and something
like 2010-05-09 12:51:01.123, though. Because the resulting timestamp
contains milliseconds, it's probably fair to ask the epoch time to be given
in millis too. That's easy to do both in Python and in Java:
def example_keyword():
print '*INFO:%s* Hello, world' % (time.time()*1000)
public void exampleKeyword() {
System.out.println("*INFO:" + System.currentTimeMillis() + "*
Hello, world!";
}
For a user this is obviously slightly more complicated than getting a
correct timestamp automatically but I don't think that matters because:
1) You can have a single logger method (or even separate logger class) that
your library uses and thus only need to give the time once.
2) As seen by above examples actually giving the time is next to trivial.
3) You can also use new `robot.logging.api` (issue 339) or `logging` (issue
456) APIs and get accurate timestamps automatically.
4) In most cases not having an exactly correct timestamp doesn't really
matter in the first place.
