Appenders and AppDomains

[Peter Drier <pe...@gmail.com>]

My apologies for responding to a message 4 months old, but it's a better
place to start than from scratch..

I have an app that I'm new too which has insufficient logging (and
configuration therein) for my purposes. So, after years with log4net, I'm
trying to switch the folks..

The app itself is a container with multiple sub applications within it..
all app-domained to insanity by most standards, but it's fairly necessary in
the world i'm in.

To that end, the logging we have now is closest to 1) below, just not
log4net.  Well, actually, they write to log4net on the tail end of the
process to get to an actual file, but lets not get into how much that isn't
really using log4net.  The existing logging marshals itself to a central
domain via intra app-domain remoting.  Unfortunately, the homegrown version
loses almost everything but the log message and exception.ToString()...

I'm wondering if it's possible to do a combination of the 2 answers below.
To use Remoting to get all the app domain's logging events back to a single
master logging domain, but without going out to the network and incurring
the resultant overhead of out of process serialization.

Thinking out loud..  If each child app domain had a single appender (root,
debug+ ) which itself internalized answer 1) to link to a master log4net
instance in the main app-domain.  And then the main app-domain's log4net was
normal, it could output everything or some things as configured normally..

I think I'd need 3 things for this plan to work..

#1.  A central sink for receiving messages in the parent app-domain and
pumping them through it's log4net system (hopefully without losing the
contextual information)  This would probably have to be MarshalByRef, and
may already exist.  This would receive LoggingEvents from #2 and push them
somehow into it's plumbing.  Where's the best entry point for entering
LoggingEvents?

#2. Something similar to the ForwardingAppender which knows how to find #1
internally via remoting. (no sockets or smtp :)  I've extended appenders
before, so the tricky part is probably it finding #1.  This would receive
the LoggingEvents (assuming proper configuration) and pass them over to #1.


#3. Some work specific to my app to hard code #2's setup/configuration into
the startup of all child domains.

Any thoughts on this approach?

Thanks all for the many years of help.  As long as I'm doing dotnet
development, log4net will be the standard everything else is measured by..

-Peter


On 2006-07-14, "Nicko Cadell" <nicko () neoworks ! com> wrote:
>
> AppDomains are logical isolation units akin to lightweight processes.
> log4net cannot exist outside an AppDomain because nothing can exist
> outside an AppDomain. log4net must be configured in each AppDomain, and
> it know nothing about the appenders or configuration in the other
> AppDomains. Each AppDomain will have its own logger hierarchy and root
> logger.
>
> It is quite a challenge to find all the AppDomains in the process and
> hook them up. There are 2 different approaches that I can think of:
>
>
> 1) Create a MarshalByRef appender implementation, i.e. a class that
> extends MarshalByRefObject and implements the IAppender interface. This
> could just be a simple wrapper that forwards the call to another
> IAppender, allowing you to reuse the existing appenders.
> This appender and the MarshalByRef appender wrapper would need to be
> created in only 1 AppDomain. You would then need to get a reference to
> this wrapper via remoting into each of the other AppDomains and then
> attach that appender reference to the root logger in that AppDomain.
>
> 2) The other approach is similar in that it still requires remoting, but
> rather than marshalling the appender across and attaching it to the
> logger hierarchy in all the AppDomains, the events logged in the
> AppDomains are sent via remoting to a single published listener which
> re-logs the event it its AppDomain. This allows the logging events to be
> centralised in a single AppDomain, but they can still be logged in their
> own AppDomains.
>
>

> To do this you will need to use the RemotingAppender in each of your
> AppDomains. The RemotingAppender will sent the LoggingEvent via .NET
> remoting to a published listener. The RemoteLoggingServerPlugin is a
> built-in way of publishing a listener. See the Remoting examples in the
> log4net download, examples\net\1.0\Remoting. In your case rather than
> running separate processes, one of your AppDomains will be the server
> (and receive logging events) and all the other AppDomains will be the
> clients.
>
> Cheers,
> Nicko
>
>