LogBox Appenders - Submit your own appenders

ColdBox MVC, LogBox

Luis Majano July 13, 2009

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Luis Majano

July 13, 2009

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As you have probably read a few days ago we released LogBox: An enterprise ColdFusion Logging Library, part of the new ColdBox 3.0.0 Platform Suite. The library's core of logging takes place thanks to its appenders that send messages to different destinations. As of now, the distribution has 11 appenders included, but if you want to build your own, you can very very easily. Not only that, since we are in Beta, you can submit your appenders and we will include them in the distribution if they are cool! So here is a little tip and trick on building appenders:

Appender

An appender is an object that LogBox uses in order to log statements to a destination repository. All appenders act as destinations that can be from databases, JMS, Twitter, files, consoles, sockets, etc. Their job is to take the logged message and store it or send it somewhere. LogBox comes bundled with the following appenders that can be found in the package coldbox.system.logging.appenders:

Appender	Description
AsyncFileAppender	An Asynchronous file appender
AsyncRollingFileAppender	An Asynchronous file appender that can do file rotation and archiving
CFAppender	Will deliver messages to the coldfusion logs
ConsoleAppender	Will deliver messages to the console via system.out
DBAppender	Will deliver messages to a database table. It can even auto create the table for you.
EmailAppender	Will deliver messages to any email address
FileAppender	Will deliver messages a file
RollingFileAppender	A file appender that can do file rotation and archiving
ScopeAppender	Will deliver messages to any ColdFusion scope you desire
SocketAppender	Will connect to any server socket and deliver messages
TwitterAppender	Can either send direct messages to a twitter user or update a status of a twitter user.

You can define 1 or all of these appenders in LogBox at any point in time. You can even register as many instances of any appender by just naming them differently.

In order to create your own appenders, you will have to create a cfc that extends coldbox.system.logging.AbstractAppender and implement the following methods:

init() : Your constructor
logMessage() : The method that is called when a message is received
onRegistration() : An interceptor that fires when the appender gets created and initialized. It can be used for preparing the appender for operation.
onUnRegistration() : An interceptor that fires when the appender is removed from a logger.

So how easy is it, well take a look at this simple console appender.



	
	
	
		
		
		
		
		
			// Init supertype
			super.init(argumentCollection=arguments);
			
			instance.out = createObject("java","java.lang.System").out;
						
			return this;
		
		
	
	
	
		
		
		
		
			var loge = arguments.logEvent;
			var entry = "";
			
			if( hasCustomLayout() ){
				entry = getCustomLayout().format(loge);
			}
			else{
				entry = "#severityToString(loge.getseverity())# #loge.getCategory()# #loge.getmessage()# ExtraInfo: #loge.getextraInfoAsString()#";
			}
			
			// Log message
			instance.out.println(entry);