IBM Content Navigator plugin : logging using Log4J

Question

Hi all IBM ICN Developers,

I am working on writing an ICN plugin. I want my logger statements to get logged into a separate file rather than going in System.Out file. Has anyone configured the custom logging by using Log4J libraries in an ICN Plugin? I tried configuring exactly as we do in a Java program but the log file is not getting generated in the configured directory. Here is my log4j.properties file

# Root logger option
log4j.rootLogger=INFO, file

# Redirect log messages to a log file, support file rolling.
log4j.appender.file=org.apache.log4j.RollingFileAppender
log4j.appender.file.File=/tmp/MyPlugin.log
log4j.appender.file.MaxFileSize=5MB
log4j.appender.file.MaxBackupIndex=10
log4j.appender.file.layout=org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout
log4j.appender.file.layout.ConversionPattern=%d{yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss} %-5p %c{1}:%L - %m%n

I tried placing the log4j.properties file inside /src folder and even directly under / folder.

Can someone please help me with some pointers?

Thanks in advance..

Answer 1

Which version of ICN are you developing on. I think(!) starting 3.0.9 IBM removed log4j in favor of JUL (Java Utility Logging).

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

Solved. Created a separate class for initializing logger instance. The init method is called from the code which gets called in the beginning of the plugin execution.

public class LoggingUtil {
    private static LoggingUtil instance = null;
    private static RollingFileAppender rfa = null;
    
    protected LoggingUtil() {
        
    }
    
    public static LoggingUtil getInstance() {
        if(instance == null) {
            instance = new LoggingUtil();
          }
          return instance;
    }
    
    public void init() {

        if (rfa == null) {

            try{
                LoggerContext context  = (LoggerContext)LogManager.getContext(false);
                File file = new File("//opt//log4j.xml");
                
                context.setConfigLocation(file.toURI());
                System.out.println("Log4J properties configured...");
            }catch(Exception e){
                System.out.println("ERROR occurred while loading properties file");
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
        }
    }
}