Custom logging in Content Center customer toolkit

Bill Klish

TeamSite 6.5 SP1
Solaris 2.9

I have added some custom Java servlets, JSPs and business logic classes to interact with a TeamSite workflow CGI task. I attempted to use the apache commons logging framework as I see it is included in the content center web application library.

So we have code similar to the following in all our code:

private static final Log logger = LogFactory.getLog(className.class);

What ends up happening is that the framework doesn't find the log4j classes that are also in the web app's lib directory. I dumped out some debug messages and it seems like the log messages are falling through to the jdk standard logging, which in turn is getting dumped into servletd.log.

At a past client, we forced the java code to create log4j objects instead of commons logging. We ended up adding a log4j.xml file to the customer toolkit in etc/conf/customer. By doing that, what ended up happening was a bunch of messages thrown in the servletd.log saying that the log4j.xml file was invalid.

static Logger logger = Logger.getLogger(className.class.getName());

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servletd.log:log4j:ERROR Parsing error on line 5 and column 36
servletd.log:log4j:ERROR Document root element "log4j:configuration", must match DOCTYPE root "null".
servletd.log:log4j:ERROR Parsing error on line 5 and column 36
servletd.log:log4j:ERROR Document is invalid: no grammar found.
[/html]
I wish this was documented in the UICG. I suppose I can file a feature request for that, but in the meantime, can anyone shed some light on best practices for this?

Yukka

Log4j works fine with custom content center web applications. But you need to use log4j version 1.0.
Prior to log4j version 1.2, loggers were known as category.

So define a category in your custom log4j.xml:
[html]




debug="false">

















[/html]

And use in your java code something like

static Category logger = Category.getInstance("MYAPP");

Regards,
Oliver