Can't turn off HtmlUnit logging messages

Question

I'm using HtmlUnit to interact with a web page that interacts with the server via Ajax. Soon after the Ajax code starts, HtmlUnit produces these two log messages:

WARNING: Ignoring XMLHttpRequest.setRequestHeader for Content-length: it is a restricted header
Mar 3, 2011 3:32:47 PM com.gargoylesoftware.htmlunit.javascript.host.xml.XMLHttpRequest jsxFunction_setRequestHeader
WARNING: Ignoring XMLHttpRequest.setRequestHeader for Connection: it is a restricted header
Mar 3, 2011 3:32:47 PM com.gargoylesoftware.htmlunit.javascript.host.xml.XMLHttpRequest jsxGet_status

...Followed by this message, repeated six times:

SEVERE: XMLHttpRequest.status was retrieved before the response was available.
Mar 3, 2011 3:32:47 PM com.gargoylesoftware.htmlunit.javascript.host.xml.XMLHttpRequest jsxGet_status

I can't figure out how to turn these messages off. Trawling through the code shows that they're produced by direct calls to a logger, not via a handler object that I could provide a do-nothing implementation for, as I already do for CSS errors. The HtmlUnit logging page indicates that adding this code should work:

System.getProperties().put("org.apache.commons.logging.simplelog.defaultlog", "fatal");

...but it has no effect. I also tried adding the following option where I invoke java:

-Dorg.apache.commons.logging.simplelog.defaultlog=fatal

...but that also has no effect.

I guess I could redirect stderr to /dev/null while this code is executing, but are any less hacky solutions available?

Answer 1

You can also use:

org.apache.log4j.Logger.getLogger("com.gargoylesoftware.htmlunit").setLevel(org.apache.log4j.Level.FATAL);
java.util.logging.Logger.getLogger("com.gargoylesoftware.htmlunit").setLevel(java.util.logging.Level.SEVERE);

Answer 2

I too had issues with this.. The answer depends on what logging system commons-logging is using under the hood. (since common-logging is just a wrapper). See the following http://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-logging/guide.html#Configuring_The_Underlying_Logging_System

The attribute you mention above (org.apache.commons.logging.simplelog.defaultlog) should only be valid if the simple logger is been used. If you are running on JDK 1.4 or higher however it should default to using the JDK logging. In which case it defaults to using the lib/logging.properties from the JRE install location.

In my case I had Log4j in the classpath, so it defaulted to that.

To take away the randomness of all this you can explicitly set the Logger yourself. Create a commons-logging.properties file in the classpath and pass in the logger to use e.g.

# JDK Logging
#org.apache.commons.logging.Log=org.apache.commons.logging.impl.Jdk14Logger
# Log4j logging (also required log4j.jar to be in classpath)
org.apache.commons.logging.Log=org.apache.commons.logging.impl.Log4JLogger

For log4j, adding the following the log4j.properties stops the warnings from HtmlUnit.

log4j.logger.com.gargoylesoftware.htmlunit=ERROR