Friday, September 27, 2013

EntLib6 - EventSource & Keywords for Semantic Logs

In this post we are going to discuss two very common details for defining event source. They are EventLevel and EventKeyword. They are so central for defining and enabling events. Yet, it is very easy to make mistake in using or expecting a particular behavior with the values used for them. The value assigned to them might include other values as well, which might come as a surprise for others.

Event Level
As we discussed, the event level selected for enabling a listener is the maximum value of the level which would be forwarded to the subscribed sinks. All events assigned with levels equal or lesser than the assigned enumeration values are considered enabled.

I have really felt that intellisence is not really useful in this case. The levels are ordered in the ascending order of their names. It could have been really useful if they could be available in the order of their values [but there are some things in life you cannot get, hence the void... :)]



Let us try to make it a little easier. We can come up with an acronym like from top to bottom, it is VIWECL. In order to remember this, we can come up with some catchy phrase like Very Intelligent Wife so Extremely Cool Life. Here whatever level we specify to enable the event source, all the lower levels are automatically included. I think we should not forget it now. When someone special is involved, it is better to try not to forget...



Keywords As Power of 2
It must be remembered that keywords must be assigned values in power of 2. It makes it easier to enable and disable the events. Here is an inner class Keywords defined in an EventSource. You can see that the values are 1, 2, 4, 8. They are powers of 0, 1, 2, 3 respectively.


In order to understand how we can use these keywords, we need to understand the bit mask for these keywords. We have the bit masks for Creation, AdmissionApproved, FeeDeposited and TransferCreditHours.



Definition of EventSource
Let us introduce an EventSource. The event source has four [Event] based methods. The methods are using the values of keywords defined above. They are also assigned with particular


Special Event Level & Keyword
EventLevel.LogAlways has special meaning when we use it to enable the events. It means to ignore levels when filtering is being applied i.e. all levels are considered. Since this is a perfectly fine EventLevel value which could be assigned to an Event method, it might get confusing when you would just want to enable the events assigned to this level, as it has a specific mean in this scenario. I think we should better avoid it when defining our events. I still have this in my EventSource just to give you an example.

Similar is the case for Keywords.All. It means to include all keywords. Basically, when we don't specify an Keyword to enable a scenario, all those events which are assigned with a specific value of keywords are just ignored. If we want to consider all of them instead, we can use this value for EventKeyword when enabling events. It has a value -1. We can use this value for enabling all keywords with xml configuration in the case of Semantic Logging Service configuration.

Configuration for In-Proc usage
As we have discussed before we can use SLAB both In-Proc and Out-Proc scenarios. For the In-Proc scenarios, we can enable the events using ObservableEventListener specifying the details of event's levels and keywords we are specially interested in. Let's first consider the case of specials for level and keyword. Here we are using EventLevel.Always and Keyword.All, which means to say, I want to log everything.


And it does have all the logs, no matter what Level or Keywords they are assigned with. Here is the output for the above code:



EventLevel.LogAlways with other keywords
Let's see the following combination. Here we are using EventLevel.LogAlways with two keywords.


If you go back and look at the definition of our EventSource, we don't have this combination of Level and Keywords for any event. There is only one event with Level assigned as EventLevel.LogAlways, but that has different keyword assigned.

So does it mean, it should include none of the events? Acutally No!!!

As we have discussed before, it has a special meaning the case when we are enabling event. It means to ignore whatever value of level assigned to events. In other words, just use the keywords specified for enabling the events. So it should just enable the two events, defined with the specified keywords. If we run this code, it shows the following output:



Level is the Max Level for Events
As we have discussed in the stairs diagram for Events. The event level assigned is the maximum value for the EventLevel considered for logging. In the following example, we are using EventLevel.Error for enabling the event. If we look at the diagram, we should realize, it would automatically include EventLevel.Critical and EventLevel.LogAlways. Let's change the configuration as follows:


As expected, it includes events assigned with levels as EventLevel.Error, EventLevel.Critical and EventLevel.LogAlways. Here is the output:



-matchAnyKeyword for Out-Proc Configuration
We can use a similar configuration for Out-Proc scenario. In the Semantic Logging service provided by Semantic Logging Application Block, matchAnyKeyword attribute is provided for source configuration. The value assigned to this keyword is treated differently. It is the sum of all keywords we want to enable. Here we want to enable Keyword.Creation and Keyword.AdmissionApproved. We need to just add the two numbers to calculate the value which should be assigned to the attribute. We can also use bit calculation by masking the two keyword bits. We can then convert the value in decimal as follows:



Let's use this in the configuration for the service. Here we are interested in the events with maximum level assigned as EventLevel.Informational. We are specially interested in the two keywords specified above.


Since we are using Windows Azure Sink with Storage Simulator, we should be able to see the following events logged in SLAB table.



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