Question|Feature: Multi-Tag Writer

The following scenario occurs:

• Library 1: Logs to TAG “Lib1”
• Library 2: Logs to TAG “Lib2”
• Main program includes the libs (but cannot change them) and logs to TAG “Main”
• All tags shall appear in the the same log (typically a file, but could be something else)

So the question is (or an idea if the feature does not exists yet) is:

Can a writer support multiple tags.

writer.tag = Lib1|Lib2|Main
writer.tag = Lib1,Lib2,Main

On writer creation the writer would then just need to be written so several positions on the matrix[TAG][LEVEL] like the levels already do. I am not sure whether this is already possible as the matrix supports this feature but it seems for each entry a new writer object is created and I could not find any other way on how to set the multiple tags on the writer. That approach would be a very small change to ConfigurationParser.

Possible other approaches to the problem are (but none is fully convincing)

• SharedFileWriter (but this is an overkill with locking and seems to not work inside one thread in one program?)
• Static writers like the Console writer (so a static File Writer with a static FileStream) do work
• Having a “Forwarding” Writer does in principlly work (it forwards the log to another tag. But has a bit problems with the required log entries if they differ as you need to know about the required log entries before all writers exists).
• Use an user defined writer (extend FileWriteR) which gets all TAGs and filter for the TAGS of interest.

[Git5000]

I think it is a nice enhancement in function and configuration possibility for very little effort and risk. Your architecture of the tags and levels basically asks for such a feature 😃

After your hint this morning, I implemented for my use case the “catchall” function storing the necessary tags as a “user field”. The loggers work now as expected but it requires extending or copying all used writers. Which is no problem but not a very elegant solution. So I would revert that and use the multi-tag feature instead.

[github-actions[bot]]

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