WebnetLog - Logging made easy

WebnetLog is small extension of android.util.Log class, bringing simpler usage and automatically adding useful technical information to log entries to simplify debugging of your Android applications.

Installation

Edit your master gradle.build file and add maven { url 'https://jitpack.io' } to your current repositories block content (if you use other jitpack hosted libraries, then this step can be skipped):

allprojects {
  repositories {
    maven { url 'https://jitpack.io' }
    }
}

Next, edit your module's build.gradle and the following dependency:

compile 'com.github.MarcinOrlowski:WebnetLog:<VERSION>'

For recent value of <VERSION> consult library releases or jitpack badge:

Log content

The main purpose of WebnetLog class was making debugging easier. This means you should your log entries more useful, by providing additional information helping locating adds some additional debug information to log message to make it more useful at less efforts. Let's see example usage of standard Log class:

Log.d("TAG", "foo");

This would produce following entry (timestamp and package id removed) in your log:

06-20 15:49:36.640 29827-29834/pkg.id D/TAG﹕foo

This is not very useful, as all you can tell from this entry is that "foo" was looged, not to mention I personally never found tagging log entries useful. I prefer more clear information - class name, line numbers etc. So let's check what WebnetLog could give you out of the box. When using WebnetLog you do not need to give a tag (but you can if you want, of course), just the message:

WebnetLog.d("foo");

and you would get output as follow:

06-20 15:49:36.640 29827-29834/pkg.id D/WebnetLog﹕StartActivity$Stasis/test()[+25]: foo

As you can see we can tell, that this log entry was produced by method d(), invoked in inner class Stasis of StartActivity class, in method test(), in line 25 of the source file.

Even better, you can just ommit the arguments, and just do:

WebnetLog.d();

to get almost the same information logged:

 06-20 15:49:36.640 29827-29834/pkg.id D/WebnetLog﹕StartActivity$Stasis/test()[+25]

Usage

WebnetLog's API is almost identical to standard Log class, with the exception there's no TAG argument used. All methods (i(), w(), d(), e()) are there with additional signatures for easier logging.

Instead of doing:

Log.d(TAG, "foo bar");

you should be now calling:

WebnetLog.d("foo bar");

As class adds own content to the logged message, your log message is now optional and you can safely do:

WebnetLog.d();

and still have lot of useful debug info logged:

06-20 15:49:36.640 29827-29834/pkg.id D/WebnetLog﹕StartActivity$Stasis/test()[+25]

Tagging

If you do not want default WebnetLog tag, then you can use setTag("string") to set up different tag (tag is static, so you need to set it only once):

WebnetLog.setTag("MyTag");
WebnetLog.d();

would produce:

06-20 15:49:36.640 29827-29834/pkg.id D/MyTag﹕StartActivity$Stasis/test()[+25]

You can also pass any object to setTag() and then tag will be set to object class' simple name:

Class Foo {
  public void test() {
    WebnetLog.setTag(this);
    WebnetLog.d();
  }
}

would produce:

06-20 15:49:36.640 29827-29834/pkg.id D/Foo﹕Foo/test()[+25]

Removing logs from production builds

You can safely strip WebnetLog class during minification, and library comes with ProGuard config bundled. If for any reason you use it differently, add this to your ProGuard config file:

-assumenosideeffects class com.webnetmobile.tools.webnetlog.WebnetLog {
     public static boolean isLoggable(java.lang.String, int);
     public static int v(...);
     public static int i(...);
     public static int w(...);
     public static int d(...);
     public static int e(...);
}

Project support

WebnetLog is free software and you can use it fully free of charge in any of your projects, open source or commercial, however if you feel it prevent you from reinventing the wheel, helped having your projects done or simply saved you time and money then then feel free to donate to the project by sending some BTC to 1LbfbmZ1KfSNNTGAEHtP63h7FPDEPTa3Yo.

Contributing

Please report any issue spotted using GitHub's project tracker.

If you'd like to contribute to the this project, please open new ticket before doing any work. This will help us save your time in case I'd not be able to accept such changes. But if all is good and clear then follow common routine:

• fork the project
• create new branch
• do your changes
• send pull request

License

• Written and copyrighted ©2015-2017 by Marcin Orlowski <mail (#) marcinorlowski (.) com>
• WebnetLog is open-sourced library licensed under the Apache 2.0 license