Logging to a File in Apollo

Since Apollo apps will be run as standalone desktop applications, logging to trace output or a LocalConnection won’t really be useful once the app is installed on the end-user’s machine. It would be great to log (a responsible amount) (if you want) to the resource directory of that application itself. And it would be nice to be able to use built in logging to do so.

Well, I don’t know why this wasn’t included with Apollo, but it was certainly easy enough to add in. :) I created com.partlyhuman.apollo.logging.FileTarget so you can use the Flex logging framework while logging to a file. It supports all the options of TraceTarget (livedocs), and you can also (optionally) specify a custom filename to log to, or force it to append log output across sesssions.

Here’s how you might put in a file logging target in MXML:

<logging:FileTarget
	filename="error.log"
	append="false"
	level="{LogEventLevel.ERROR}"
	includeDate="true"
	includeTime="true"
	includeCategory="true"
	includeLevel="true"/>

That’s showing off a lot of the options. You could just do <logging:FileTarget/> and all would be fine. And if you haven’t checked out logging in Flex, it’s pretty nice (livedocs). All logging events have a category, so you get a logger for that category then call the appropriate level on it, or call log with the level as an argument. For example:

Log.getLogger("com.partlyhuman.demoapp.MainController").error("initialization failed!");
Log.getLogger("com.partlyhuman.demoapp.Bubble").info("bubble popped!");

You don’t have to be so verbose in your categories, but that’s one way to use it.

This is gonna totally become like, a thing, but… happy logging!

com.partlyhuman.apollo.FileTarget View Source | Download (.as, 3k)