Logging

ASF allows you to configure your own custom logging module that will be used during runtime. You can do so by putting special file named NLog.config in application’s directory. You can read entire documentation of NLog on NLog wiki, but in addition to that you'll find some useful examples here as well.

Default logging

By default, ASF is logging to ColoredConsole (standard output) and File. File logging includes log.txt file in program's directory, and logs directory for archival purposes.

Using custom NLog config automatically disables default ASF config, your config overrides completely default ASF logging, which means that if you want to keep e.g. our ColoredConsole target, then you must define it yourself. This allows you to not only add extra logging targets, but also disable or modify default ones.

If you want to use default ASF logging without any modifications, you don't need to do anything - you also don't need to define it in custom NLog.config. Don't use custom NLog.config if you don't want to modify default ASF logging. For reference though, equivalent of hardcoded ASF default logging would be:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<nlog xmlns="https://nlog-project.org/schemas/NLog.xsd" xsi:schemaLocation="NLog NLog.xsd" xmlns:xsi="https://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
  <targets>
    <target xsi:type="ColoredConsole" name="ColoredConsole" layout="${date:format=yyyy-MM-dd HH\:mm\:ss}|${processname}-${processid}|${level:uppercase=true}|${logger}|${message}${onexception:inner= ${exception:format=toString,Data}}" />
    <target xsi:type="File" name="File" archiveFileName="${currentdir}/logs/log.{#}.txt" archiveNumbering="Rolling" archiveOldFileOnStartup="true" cleanupFileName="false" concurrentWrites="false" deleteOldFileOnStartup="true" fileName="${currentdir}/log.txt" layout="${date:format=yyyy-MM-dd HH\:mm\:ss}|${processname}-${processid}|${level:uppercase=true}|${logger}|${message}${onexception:inner= ${exception:format=toString,Data}}" maxArchiveFiles="10" />
    <!-- Below becomes active when ASF's IPC interface is started -->
    <!-- <target type="History" name="History" layout="${date:format=yyyy-MM-dd HH\:mm\:ss}|${processname}-${processid}|${level:uppercase=true}|${logger}|${message}${onexception:inner= ${exception:format=toString,Data}}" maxCount="20" /> -->
  </targets>

  <rules>
    <logger name="*" minlevel="Debug" writeTo="ColoredConsole" />
    <logger name="*" minlevel="Debug" writeTo="File" />
    <!-- Below becomes active when ASF's IPC interface is started -->
    <!-- <logger name="*" minlevel="Debug" writeTo="History" /> -->
  </rules>
</nlog>

ASF integration

ASF includes some nice code tricks that enhance its integration with NLog, allowing you to catch specific messages more easily.

NLog-specific ${logger} variable will always distinguish the source of the message - it will be either BotName of one of your bots, or ASF if message comes from ASF process directly. This way you can easily catch messages considering specific bot(s), or ASF process (only), instead of all of them, based on the name of the logger.

ASF tries to mark messages appropriately based on NLog-provided warning levels, which makes it possible for you to catch only specific messages from specific log levels instead of all of them. Of course, logging level for specific message can't be customized, as it's ASF hardcoded decision how serious given message is, but you definitely can make ASF less/more silent, as you see fit.

ASF logs extra info, such as user/chat messages on Trace logging level. Default ASF logging logs only Debug level and above, which hides that extra information, as it's not needed for majority of users, plus clutters output containing potentially more important messages. You can however make use of that information by re-enabling Trace logging level, especially in combination with logging only one specific bot of your choice, with particular event you're interested in.

In general, ASF tries to make it as easy and convenient for you as possible, to log only messages you want instead of forcing you to manually filter it through third-party tools such as grep and alike. Simply configure NLog properly as written below, and you should be able to specify even very complex logging rules with custom targets such as entire databases.

Regarding versioning - ASF tries to always ship with most up-to-date version of NLog that is available on NuGet at the time of ASF release. It's very often a version that is newer than latest stable, therefore it should not be a problem to use any feature you can find on NLog wiki in ASF, even features that are in very active development and WIP state - just make sure you're also using up-to-date ASF.

As part of ASF integration, ASF also includes support for additional ASF NLog logging targets, which will be explained below.

Examples

Let's start from something easy. We will use ColoredConsole target only. Our initial NLog.config will look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<nlog xmlns="https://nlog-project.org/schemas/NLog.xsd" xsi:schemaLocation="NLog NLog.xsd" xmlns:xsi="https://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
  <targets>
    <target xsi:type="ColoredConsole" name="ColoredConsole" />
  </targets>

  <rules>
    <logger name="*" minlevel="Debug" writeTo="ColoredConsole" />
  </rules>
</nlog>

The explanation of above config is rather simple - we define one logging target, which is ColoredConsole, then we redirect all loggers (*) of level Debug and higher to ColoredConsole target we defined earlier. That's it.

If you start ASF with above NLog.config now, only ColoredConsole target will be active, and ASF won't write to File, regardless of hardcoded ASF NLog configuration.

Now let's say that we don't like default format of ${longdate}|${level:uppercase=true}|${logger}|${message} and we want to log message only. We can do so by modifying Layout of our target.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<nlog xmlns="https://nlog-project.org/schemas/NLog.xsd" xsi:schemaLocation="NLog NLog.xsd" xmlns:xsi="https://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
  <targets>
    <target xsi:type="ColoredConsole" name="ColoredConsole" layout="${message}" />
  </targets>

  <rules>
    <logger name="*" minlevel="Debug" writeTo="ColoredConsole" />
  </rules>
</nlog>

If you launch ASF now, you'll notice that date, level and logger name disappeared - leaving you only with ASF messages in format of Function() Message.

We can also modify the config to log to more than one target. Let's log to ColoredConsole and File at the same time.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<nlog xmlns="https://nlog-project.org/schemas/NLog.xsd" xsi:schemaLocation="NLog NLog.xsd" xmlns:xsi="https://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
  <targets>
    <target xsi:type="ColoredConsole" name="ColoredConsole" />
    <target xsi:type="File" name="File" fileName="${currentdir}/NLog.txt" deleteOldFileOnStartup="true" />
  </targets>

  <rules>
    <logger name="*" minlevel="Debug" writeTo="ColoredConsole" />
    <logger name="*" minlevel="Debug" writeTo="File" />
  </rules>
</nlog>

And done, we'll now log everything to ColoredConsole and File. Did you notice that you can also specify custom fileName and extra options?

Finally, ASF uses various log levels, to make it easier for you to understand what is going on. We can use that information for modifying severity logging. Let's say that we want to log everything (Trace) to File, but only Warning and above log level to the ColoredConsole. We can achieve that by modifying our rules:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<nlog xmlns="https://nlog-project.org/schemas/NLog.xsd" xsi:schemaLocation="NLog NLog.xsd" xmlns:xsi="https://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
  <targets>
    <target xsi:type="ColoredConsole" name="ColoredConsole" />
    <target xsi:type="File" name="File" fileName="${currentdir}/NLog.txt" deleteOldFileOnStartup="true" />
  </targets>

  <rules>
    <logger name="*" minlevel="Warn" writeTo="ColoredConsole" />
    <logger name="*" minlevel="Trace" writeTo="File" />
  </rules>
</nlog>

That's it, now our ColoredConsole will show only warnings and above, while still logging everything to File. You can further tweak it to log e.g. only Info and below, and so on.

Lastly, let's do something a bit more advanced and log all messages to file, but only from bot named LogBot.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<nlog xmlns="https://nlog-project.org/schemas/NLog.xsd" xsi:schemaLocation="NLog NLog.xsd" xmlns:xsi="https://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
  <targets>
    <target xsi:type="ColoredConsole" name="ColoredConsole" />
    <target xsi:type="File" name="LogBotFile" fileName="${currentdir}/LogBot.txt" deleteOldFileOnStartup="true" />
  </targets>

  <rules>
    <logger name="*" minlevel="Debug" writeTo="ColoredConsole" />
    <logger name="LogBot" minlevel="Trace" writeTo="LogBotFile" />
  </rules>
</nlog>

You can see how we used ASF integration above and easily distinguished source of the message based on ${logger} property.

Advanced usage

The examples above are rather simple and made to show you how easy it is to define your own logging rules that can be used with ASF. You can use NLog for various different things, including complex targets (such as keeping logs in Database), logs rotation (such as removing old File logs), using custom Layouts, declaring your own <when> logging filters and much more. I encourage you to read through entire NLog documentation to learn about every option that is available to you, allowing you to fine-tune ASF logging module in the way you want. It's a really powerful tool and customizing ASF logging was never easier.

Limitations

ASF will temporarily disable all rules that include ColoredConsole or Console targets when expecting user input. Therefore, if you want to keep logging for other targets even when ASF expects user input, you should define those targets with their own rules, as shown in examples above, instead of putting many targets in writeTo of the same rule (unless this is your wanted behaviour). Temporary disable of console targets is done in order to keep console clean when waiting for user input.

Chat logging

ASF includes extended support for chat logging by not only recording all received/sent messages on Trace logging level, but also exposing extra info related to them in event properties. This is because we need to handle chat messages as commands anyway, so it doesn't cost us anything to log those events in order to make it possible for you to add extra logic (such as making ASF your personal Steam chatting archive).

Event properties

Name	Description
Echo	`bool` type. This is set to `true` when message is being sent from us to the recipient, and `false` otherwise.
Message	`string` type. This is the actual sent/received message.
ChatGroupID	`ulong` type. This is the ID of the group chat for sent/received messages. Will be `0` when no group chat is used for transmitting this message.
ChatID	`ulong` type. This is the ID of the `ChatGroupID` channel for sent/received messages. Will be `0` when no group chat is used for transmitting this message.
SteamID	`ulong` type. This is the ID of the Steam user for sent/received messages. Can be `0` when no particular user is involved in the message transmission (e.g. when it's us sending a message to a group chat).

Example

This example is based on our ColoredConsole basic example above. Before trying to understand it, I strongly recommend to take a look above in order to learn about basics of NLog logging firstly.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<nlog xmlns="https://nlog-project.org/schemas/NLog.xsd" xsi:schemaLocation="NLog NLog.xsd" xmlns:xsi="https://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
  <targets>
    <target xsi:type="ColoredConsole" name="ColoredConsole" />
    <target xsi:type="File" name="ChatLogFile" fileName="${currentdir}/${event-properties:item=ChatGroupID}-${event-properties:item=ChatID}${when:when='${event-properties:item=ChatGroupID}' == 0:inner=-${event-properties:item=SteamID}}.txt" layout="${date:format=yyyy-MM-dd HH\:mm\:ss} ${event-properties:item=Message} ${when:when='${event-properties:item=Echo}' == true:inner=-&gt;:else=&lt;-} ${event-properties:item=SteamID}" />
  </targets>

  <rules>
    <logger name="*" minlevel="Debug" writeTo="ColoredConsole" />
    <logger name="MainAccount" level="Trace" writeTo="ChatLogFile">
      <filters>
        <when condition="not starts-with('${message}','OnIncoming') and not starts-with('${message}','SendMessage')" action="Ignore" />
      </filters>
    </logger>
  </rules>
</nlog>

We've started from our basic ColoredConsole example and extended it further. First and foremost, we've prepared a permanent chat log file per each group channel and Steam user - this is possible thanks to extra properties that ASF exposes to us in a fancy way. We've also decided to go with a custom layout that writes only current date, the message, sent/received info and Steam user itself. Lastly, we've enabled our chat logging rule only for Trace level, only for our MainAccount bot and only for functions related to chat logging (OnIncoming* which is used for receiving messages and echos, and SendMessage* for ASF messages sending).

The example above will generate 0-0-76561198069026042.txt file when talking with ArchiBoT:

2018-07-26 01:38:38 how are you doing? -> 76561198069026042
2018-07-26 01:38:38 I'm doing great, how about you? <- 76561198069026042

Of course this is just a working example with a few nice layout tricks showed in practical manner. You can further expand this idea to your own needs, such as extra filtering, custom order, personal layout, recording only received messages and so on.

ASF targets

In addition to standard NLog logging targets (such as ColoredConsole and File explained above), you can also use custom ASF logging targets.

For maximum completeness, definition of ASF targets will follow NLog documentation convention.

SteamTarget

As you can guess, this target uses Steam chat messages for logging ASF messages. You can configure it to use either a group chat, or private chat. In addition to specifying a Steam target for your messages, you can also specify botName of the bot that is supposed to send those.

Supported in all environments used by ASF.

Configuration Syntax

<targets>
  <target type="Steam"
          name="String"
          layout="Layout"
          chatGroupID="Ulong"
          steamID="Ulong"
          botName="Layout" />
</targets>

Read more about using the Configuration File.

Parameters

General Options

name - Name of the target.

Layout Options

layout - Text to be rendered. Layout Required. Default: ${level:uppercase=true}|${logger}|${message}

SteamTarget Options

chatGroupID - ID of the group chat declared as 64-bit long unsigned integer. Not required. Defaults to 0 which will disable group chat functionality and use private chat instead. When enabled (set to non-zero value), steamID property below acts as chatID and specifies ID of the channel in this chatGroupID that the bot should send messages to.

steamID - SteamID declared as 64-bit long unsigned integer of target Steam user (like SteamOwnerID), or target chatID (when chatGroupID is set). Required. Defaults to 0 which disables logging target entirely.

botName - Name of the bot (as it's recognized by ASF, case-sensitive) of target bot that will be sending messages to steamID declared above. Not required. Defaults to null which will automatically select any currently connected bot. It's recommended to set this value appropriately, as SteamTarget does not take into account many Steam limitations, such as the fact that you must have steamID of the target on your friendlist. This variable is defined as layout type, therefore you can use special syntax in it, such as ${logger} in order to use the bot that generated the message.

SteamTarget Examples

In order to write all messages of Debug level and above, from bot named MyBot to steamID of 76561198006963719, you should use NLog.config similar to below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<nlog xmlns="https://nlog-project.org/schemas/NLog.xsd" xsi:schemaLocation="NLog NLog.xsd" xmlns:xsi="https://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
  <targets>
    <target type="Steam" name="Steam" steamID="76561198006963719" botName="MyBot" />
  </targets>

  <rules>
    <logger name="*" minlevel="Debug" writeTo="Steam" />
  </rules>
</nlog>

Notice: Our SteamTarget is custom target, so you should make sure that you're declaring it as type="Steam", NOT xsi:type="Steam", as xsi is reserved for official targets supported by NLog.

When you launch ASF with NLog.config similar to above, MyBot will start messaging 76561198006963719 Steam user with all usual ASF log messages. Keep in mind that MyBot must be connected in order to send messages, so all initial ASF messages that happened before our bot could connect to Steam network, won't be forwarded.

Of course, SteamTarget has all typical functions that you could expect from generic TargetWithLayout, so you can use it in conjunction with e.g. custom layouts, names or advanced logging rules. The example above is only the most basic one.

Screenshots

Screenshot

HistoryTarget

This target is used internally by ASF for providing fixed-size logging history in /Api/NLog endpoint of ASF API that can be afterwards consumed by ASF-ui and other tools. In general you should define this target only if you're already using custom NLog config for other customizations and you also want the log to be exposed in ASF API, e.g. for ASF-ui. It can also be declared when you'd want to modify default layout or maxCount of saved messages.

Supported in all environments used by ASF.

Configuration Syntax

<targets>
  <target type="History"
          name="String"
          layout="Layout"
          maxCount="Byte" />
</targets>

Read more about using the Configuration File.

Parameters

General Options

name - Name of the target.

Layout Options

layout - Text to be rendered. Layout Required. Default: ${date:format=yyyy-MM-dd HH\:mm\:ss}|${processname}-${processid}|${level:uppercase=true}|${logger}|${message}${onexception:inner= ${exception:format=toString,Data}}

HistoryTarget Options

maxCount - Maximum amount of stored logs for on-demand history. Not required. Defaults to 20 which is a good balance for providing initial history, while still keeping in mind memory usage that comes out of storage requirements. Must be greater than 0.

Caveats

Be careful when you decide to combine Debug logging level or below in your SteamTarget with steamID that is taking part in the ASF process. This can lead to potential StackOverflowException because you'll create an infinite loop of ASF receiving given message, then logging it through Steam, resulting in another message that needs to be logged. Currently the only possibility for it to happen is to log Trace level (where ASF records its own chat messages), or Debug level while also running ASF in Debug mode (where ASF records all Steam packets).

In short, if your steamID is taking part in the same ASF process, then the minlevel logging level of your SteamTarget should be Info (or Debug if you're also not running ASF in Debug mode) and above. Alternatively you can define your own <when> logging filters in order to avoid infinite logging loop, if modifying level is not appropriate for your case. This caveat also applies to group chats.