Logging within Business Logic

The following describes how to implement logging when adding a class that implements business logic:

• Add a constant referencing the logger for the class. By convention, logger should be named "logger" and should pass the declaring class as its argument. For example, a logger in the Adjustment_CHandler class would be declared as follows:

  
  					private static final Logger logger 
  					= LoggerFactory.getLogger(Adjustment_CHandler.class);
  					
  				

• Add entries with the appropriate logging level. The levels are: debug, info, warn, error, and fatal. The following will log a warning entry to the log:

  
  					logger.warn("Unexpected status for frozen adjustment: " + status);
  					
  				

• In general, we expect entries of level info or more severe to be rare, and therefore, to not impose a substantial performance penalty. However, we can expect debug entries to be very fine grained, and they usually will not find their way to actual logs, but will be filtered out via runtime configuration. To lessen the performance impact of debug logging, the logging statement should be wrapped as follows:

  
  					if (logger.isDebugEnabled()) {
  					   logger.debug("Processing adjustment " + adjustment.getId());
  					}
  					
  				

• There are times when you want to know how long a code block takes to execute. In general, the logging provides the time each log statement is issued. However, it is clearer to see an actual elapsed time of some process being investigated. In this case, there are some additional methods on the logger:

  
  					debugStart(message) or infoStart(message) 
  					debugTime(message, start) or infoTime(message, start) 
  					
  				

  • These should be used in the pairs given, as follows:

    
    							long start = debugStart("Starting process");
    							//... code for process
    							debugTime("End process", start);
    							
    						

  • This will cause each statement to be logged, plus the final End Process statement will give the elapsed time since debugStart was called.

Please refer to the JavaDocs on the com.splwg.shared.logging.Logger class for more details.