Ismail’s umbraco adventures

Following on from Lee Kelleher’s excellent post on integrating ELMAH into Umbraco I have managed to plug in log4Net.  This technique could also be used to plugin anything else that needs access to events in global.asax for example a dependancy injection library (I will at some point blog about wiring up Ninject into Umbraco).  If you want to use log4Net with Umbraco here is what you need todo:

• Download log4Net
• Create a  project with class that inherits from HttpWebApplication class mine looks like:

  using System;
  using System.Collections.Generic;
  using System.Text;
  
  namespace Log4net4Umbraco
  {
      public class Logger : System.Web.HttpApplication
      {
  
          private static log4net.ILog log = log4net.LogManager.GetLogger(typeof(Logger));
  
          public Logger()
  		{
  			InitializeComponent();
  		}
  
          protected void Application_Start(Object sender, EventArgs e)
          {
              // Application start-up code goes here.
              log4net.Config.XmlConfigurator.Configure();
  
              log.Debug("Fired up logger in application_start");
          }
  
          protected void Application_End(Object sender, EventArgs e)
          {
  
              log.Debug("closed logger in application_end");
              log4net.LogManager.Shutdown();
  
          }
  
   	    protected void Application_Error(object sender, EventArgs e)
   	    {
   	        // Code that runs when an unhandled error occurs
  
   	        log.Error("Unhandled exception", Context.Error);
  
   	    }
  
          private void InitializeComponent()
          {
  
          }
  
      }
  }
  

• Remove App_global.asax.dll from your website bin. This file is part of umbraco distribution, it has events wired up for Umbraco basically writes start up message to umbraco log. If this is not removed then site will not fire up.
• Add the following lines to the web.config under configsections

    <configSections>
        <section  name="log4net" type="log4net.Config.Log4NetConfigurationSectionHandler, log4net"/>
    </configSections>
    <log4net configSource="config\log4net.config" />
  

• Under the config directory I added a config file called log4net.config for all the available options see the log4net documentation.

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
    <log4net>
  
   	    <appender name="RollingLogFileAppender" type="log4net.Appender.RollingFileAppender">
  <threshold value="ALL"/>
   	      <file value="C:\\Inetpub\\mysite\\data\\Logs\\site.log" />
   	      <appendToFile value="true" />
   	      <rollingStyle value="Date" />
   	      <datePattern value="yyyyMMdd" />
   	      <layout type="log4net.Layout.PatternLayout">
   	        <conversionPattern value="%date [%thread] %-5level %logger [%property{NDC}] - %message%newline" />
   	      </layout>
   	    </appender>
  
  		<root>
  				<appender-ref ref="RollingLogFileAppender"/>
  		</root>
  
  </log4net>
  

• Copy the dll and log4net dlls to the bin of your site
• Create a new global.asax file if you don’t already have one.  Point the file to the dll you created so in my case I have

  <%@ Application Codebehind="logger.cs" Inherits="Log4net4Umbraco.Logger" %>
  

Now when the application fires up log4net is initialized.  In my usercontrols or xslt extensions all I need to do to start logging is add code like

private static log4net.ILog log = log4net.LogManager.GetLogger(typeof(MyClass));

public void SomeMethod(){
     log.debug("blah blag");
}

Its all well and good logging you need a way to view the logs. So you can use one of the following to view the logs via a dashboard in Umbraco:

• Log4Net dashboard there is a free developer version
• Hacksaw