Introduction

The following short page will show how to use SimpleLog for your application.

Setting up the environment

The libraries needed in order to use SimpleLog are:

• JDom http://www.jdom.org/downloads/index.html
• SimpleLog Jar file (from Download section here)

My advice is to use Eclipse as IDE. Copy the downloaded Jar-file in the directory of your project (created with Eclipse) and perform a refresh of the Eclipse Package Explorer. The added Jar-files should appear. Now right-click on them and choose "Build Path" and "Add to Build Path". Everything should work now.

Once done the setup stuff...

Creating a SimpleLog configuration file

It is not necessary, but recommended to create a SimpleLog configuration file. The file has to be created in XML format. This is a possible sample-file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configurations>
	<configuration>
		<outputpath></outputpath>
		<outputfile>logs.xml</outputfile>
		<toStdout>true</toStdout>
		<!--saves the stack-trace if available-->
		<saveStackTrace>true</saveStackTrace>
		<!--false: uses names of the form: org.strumpflohner.main.TestClass; true: TestClass-->
		<useSimpleName>true</useSimpleName>
	</configuration>
</configurations>

Loading the configuration file

Consider you created a configuration file in the project directory (same directory from which your application starts) and you named it "logconfig.xml". Then loading of the configuration file is done as follows:

try {
   Logger.configure("logconfig.xml");
} catch (Exception e) {
   // TODO Auto-generated catch block
   e.printStackTrace(); 	
}

Example of a usage

Class MyObject representing some business class of your app that uses the logger

import org.simplelog.main.Logger;

public class MyObject {
	private Logger log = Logger.getLogger();
	
	public MyObject(){
		//do some things...
	}
	
	/**
	 * Test-method to show logging
	 * @param a
	 * @param b
	 * @return
	 */
	public int performDivision(int a, int b){
		int result = 0;
		try{
			result = a/b;
		}catch(ArithmeticException e){
			log.error(e, this.getClass());
		}
		return result;
	}
	
}

Main Class from which your application starts

The following class could represent the main class from which your application starts, where you may show a splash-screen, perform initial loadings etc... Here you should also initialize SimpleLog and pass it an eventually created configuration file.

import java.io.IOException;
import org.simplelog.main.Logger;

public class TestClass {

	/**
	 * @param args
	 * @throws IOException 
	 */
	public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
		try {
			Logger.configure("logconfig.xml");
		} catch (Exception e) {
			// TODO Auto-generated catch block
			e.printStackTrace(); 	
		}
		Logger log = Logger.getLogger();

		//do application startup loadings
		
		MyObject obj = new MyObject();
		int result = obj.performDivision(4, 0);
		
	}

}

SimpleLog automatically creates a log-file (in XML) format and an associated xsl file for formatting the created log-data.