Logging improvements sorely needed

[Dave_Novak]

First, let me make it clear that I am a big fan of Visual Build Professional. I have been regularly using this tool for the past 2 months now and have developed quite a bit of mastery over all aspects of the product. It has been invaluable in reengineering our outdated (and difficult to read) Perl-based build process.

That said, I am frankly amazed at the utter lack of logging options in a product which is otherwise quite mature. There is a huge need to have an option for “verbosity”, which should include quiet, minimal, normal, detailed, and diagnostic (or numbers or something). Furthermore, some notion of indent level would be useful as well.

Although I have had some success deleting extraneous output through regular expressions (see http://www.kinook.com/Forum/showthre...&threadid=1738), this requires the logger output to be “Text” and works only marginally at best.

XML logging has its own set of issues. Most surprising with XML logging is the fact that output is completely flat (meaning that there is no hierarchy). For example, I use a number of Groups and Subroutine Calls and I would find it useful to see output from these sections indented. But since the XML you are writing in the log file is flat, I have no way of doing this.

Any improvement in the area of logging would be a welcome feature.

Thank you for listening.

[kinook]

VBP v7 supports filtering of log output according to the message log level, coloring of output based on the log level, and also includes the step index and indent value in XML log files. The XML output is still flat (no hierarchy), but I believe the indent level would allow using XSLT to transform into hierarchical output.

http://www.kinook.com/VisBuildPro/Manual/loggingopt.htm
http://www.kinook.com/VisBuildPro/Ma...ingmoreopt.htm
http://www.kinook.com/VisBuildPro/Manual/outputpane.htm
http://www.kinook.com/VisBuildPro/Ma...gfiltertab.htm

http://www.kinook.com/Forum/showthre...?threadid=3884