structured/combined logging with Log4J

Question

I hope you can help me.

I have a web service that needs to log transactions. Since there are many hits, the log statements appears disjoint/fragmented in the log file.

I've considered passing a StringBuilder instance through-out the layers and appending the statements to this instance, then I log its contents once at the very end (finally clause in the main controller) before returning a response to the client. This seems unnecessary and I'm sure there's a cleaner way to do it with Log4J.

Can anyone shed light on the issue?

Thanks

Answer 1

the good things is that you are using Log4j. The library itself implements the concept of nested diagnostic context (org.apache.log4j.NDC) and mapped diagnostic context (org.apache.log4j.MDC). I reckon you should definitely have a look at both, because those allows you to build some sort of the context that you can use in your log output layout.