Sometimes it is useful to capture log messages in a way that is easy for
the running program to introspect or manually handle.
*BufferLogAppender* captures the logs in a simple array.
Be careful, there is no default flush/clear mechanism that runs
automatically. Users of BufferLogAppender should take care to
render/handle log messages and periodically call `clearBuffer` on the
*BufferLogAppender* instance to avoid the buffer array growing without
limit.
console.trace generates and prints a full stacktrace for every log
message. This is not what TRACE means in this library. The TRACE level
is intended for logs that are more verbose than you typically want to
log and should only be turned on when you are trying to trace the
detailed behavior of the logged functionality. Printing the full stack
trace with every message makes an already verbose setting exponentially
worse.
Taking advantage of the new LogMessageFormatter return type, the
ConsoleLogAppender logs the formatted message as-is if it is a string,
but when processing structured data inserts a string summary consisting
of the message level, scope, and message summary or method. The full
object is still logged to the console as well for inspection.
Originally the idea was that a log formatter should turn the LogMessage
into a string that can be appended via a LogAppender. However, all of
the default LogAppenders can handle objects. In particular, the
ConsoleLogAppender writes to the browser console which offers an
interactive UI experience when logging raw objects.
For LogAppenders that can only manage text, it seems an acceptable
design decision to require users to provide a LogMessageFormatter that
returns a string, or accept some sane default like JSON.stringify if
their formatter returns objects.
- Added `flattenMessage` and `FlattenedLogMessage` to default to
structured logging.
- Rework the logic formatting messages for the ConsoleLogger.
- Add a more comprehensive README.
jdb