Is there any way to automatically log the method name in Android?

Question

I'm using this kind of pattern:

public class FooProvider extends ContentProvider {
    private static final String TAG = FooProvider.class.getSimpleName(); 
    ...

    @Override
    public int update(Uri uri, ContentValues values, String where, String[] whereArgs) {
        l.v(TAG, TAG + ".update() Uri:" + uri.toString() + " " + db.getPath());

Where l is my wrapper round Androids Log.v which takes String... args. This gives logcat output like this:

FooProvider.update() Uri: foo bar etc

What I'm looking for is a way to log the method name, in this case update(), automatically and in a way which survives refactoring the way TAG does. I've seen the class.getMethods() call but can't see a way to index the returned list with the current method at runtime.

Answer 1

You may want to wrap these statements in a constant, so they get compiled out for your published version (which won't be printing Log.v statements anyway), but you can do something like this:

private static final boolean FINAL_CONSTANT_IS_LOCAL = true;
private static final String TAG = FooProvider.class.getSimpleName();

private String getLogTagWithMethod() {
    if (FINAL_CONSTANT_IS_LOCAL) {
        Throwable stack = new Throwable().fillInStackTrace();
        StackTraceElement[] trace = stack.getStackTrace();
        return trace[0].getClassName() + "." + trace[0].getMethodName() + ":" + trace[0].getLineNumber();
    } else {
        return TAG;
    }
}

It will depend upon how you call it to determine which StackTraceElement index you'll want, just debug it or play around a few times to find it.

When you compile your published version, just set FINAL_CONSTANT_IS_LOCAL to false and that code block will go away, always returning TAG.

Answer 2

It seems expensive but you could use

String Method = Thread.currentThread().getStackTrace()[2].getMethodName();

The reason you use an index of 2, is that 0 = would return currentThread and 1 = getStackTrace. This works on Java 1.5 and above, I would wrap it in some kind of if (DEBUG) {} thing so it's not in production code

Of course you will need to adjust the depth if you put that inside a method etc.