collective.logbook 0.2

Advanced Persistent Error Log

Introduction

Advanced persistent Error Logging for Plone.

Motivation

Plone generates for anonymous users an Error Page which contains an error number. But what to do with this error number?

You have to log into your plone site, go to the ZMI, check the error_log object and probably construct the url by hand to get ther proper error with this error number, like:

http://your-plone-site/error_log/showEntry?id=1237283091.10.529903983894

If you are lucky, you will find the error. If not, and the number of occured errors exceeded the number of exceptions to keep, or maybe a cronjob restarted your zope instance, then….

Hmm, not really smooth this behaviour.

Wouldn’t it be better to have a nice frontend where you can paste the error number to a field and search for it? Keep all log persistent, also when zope restarts? Keep only unique errors and not thousand times the same Error? Get an email when a new, unique error occured, so you know already what’s going on before your customer mails this error number to you?

If you think that this would be cool, collective.logbook is what you want:)

Under the Hood

No, you won’t get DOOOOMED when you install collective.logbook:)

SiteErrorLog Patch

collective.logbook patches the raising method of Products.SiteErrorLog.SiteErrorLog:

from Products.SiteErrorLog.SiteErrorLog import SiteErrorLog

_raising = SiteErrorLog.raising

def raising(self, info):
    enty_url = _raising(self, info)
    notify(ErrorRaisedEvent(self, enty_url))
    return enty_url

The patch fires an ‘ErrorRaisedEvent’ event before it returns the enty_url. The entry url is the link to the standard SiteErrorLog like:

http://your-plone-site/error_log/showEntry?id=1237283091.10.529903983894

The patch gets _only_ then installed, when you install collective.logbook over the portal_quickinstaller tool and removes the patch, when you uninstall it.

You can also deactivate the patch over the logbook configlet of the plone control panel.

Log Storage

The default storage is an annotation storage on the plone site root:

<!-- default storage adapter -->
<adapter
    for="*"
    factory=".storage.LogBookStorage"
  />

The default storage adapter creates 2 PersistentDict objects in your portal. One ‘main’ storage and one ‘index’ storage, which keeps track of referenced errors.

The storage will be fetched via an adapter lookup. So the more specific adapter will win. Maybe an SQL storage with SQLAlchemy would be nice here:)

Notify Event

When a new unique error occurs, an INotifyTraceback event gets fired. An email event handler is already registered with collective.logbook:

<subscriber
    for=".interfaces.INotifyTraceback"
    handler=".events.mailHandler"
  />

This handler will email new tracebacks to the list of email adresses specified in the logbook configlet of the plone control panel.

Properties

collective.logbook installs 2 Properties in your application root:

• logbook_enabled

• logbook_log_mails

These properties take the values you enter in logbook configlet in the plone control panel.

The first one checks if logbook logging is disabled or not when you restart your instance:

def initialize(context):
    """ Initializer called when used as a Zope 2 product. """

    app = Zope2.app()
    enabled = app.getProperty("logbook_enabled", False)

    if enabled:
        monkey.install_monkey()

The latter one is used to email new tracebacks to these email addresses.

The properties get uninstalled when you uninstall collective.logbook via the quickinstaller tool.

Unit Tests

There are some unit tests which can be run with:

./bin/instance test collective.logbook

Running:
..............
Ran 14 tests with 0 failures and 0 errors in 0.145 seconds.

more to come…

Usage

After insall, go to http://your-plone-site/@@logbook

Installation

These instructions assume that you already have a Plone 3 buildout that’s built and ready to run.

Edit your buildout.cfg file and look for the eggs key in the instance section. Add collective.logbook to that list. Your list will look something like this:

eggs =
    ${buildout:eggs}
    ${plone:eggs}
    collective.logbook

In the same section, look for the zcml key. Add collective.logbook here, too:

zcml = collective.logbook

Changelog

0.2 (2009-03-17)

• added a configlet for plone control panel [ramonski]

• added a default notify traceback email handler [ramonski]

• added propert install/uninstall methods for the SiteErrorLog patch [ramonski]

• added 2 properties in the application root [ramonski]

0.1 - Unreleased

• Initial release [ramonski]