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Tip of the Week: WireBox Debug Output

Brad Wood February 06, 2013

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Brad Wood

February 06, 2013

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If you've used WireBox for autowiring the CFCs in your application, you may have reached a point where you were having trouble figuring out what was going on behind the scenes.  This can be especially true if you've added auutowire metdata to a CFC, but the dependencies still aren't getting injected.
 
WireBox actually has pretty robust debug-level logging built in via LogBox that will tell you everything it is doing, but the question might be, "How do I see it?"  Wirebox's debug logging is kind of like the light in your fridge-- it's only on when you're looking at it.  
 
First, you need to have at least one LogBox appender enabled.  Depending on which application template you used, you may alread have a ColdboxTracerAppender appender configured which shows up when debug mode is on.  My favorite appender to set up an AsyncRollingFileAppender and then watch the text file with a tail program.
 
logBox = {
    appenders = {
        myAsycFile = {
            class="coldbox.system.logging.appenders.AsyncRollingFileAppender",
            properties={
                filePath=expandPath("/common/logs"),autoExpand=false
            }
        }
    }
};
 
Now, even if you already have an appender configured, you're probably not seeing any debug logs from WireBox; or any part of the ColdBox framework for that matter.  This is a good default, since ColdBox can be a bit chatty in debug mode.  The reason you're not seeing anything is because the "coldbox.system" category is turned off.  Remember that loggers in LogBox are named after the CFC they're in, and inherit logging settings in a hierarchical manner.  Look for a line of code similar to this in your config:
 
info = ["coldbox.system"]
 
This sets a maximum log level of "info" for anything logged inside of "coldbox.system".  Since all of WireBox's logs are debug level, they don't make the cut and get ignored.  To tell wirebox to start logging debug-level messages from WireBox, you can add the following line in the LogBox config:
 
debug = ["coldbox.system.ioc"]
 
After a quick reinit, LogBox will start logging debug messages from within coldbox.system.ioc (which is WireBox) to whatever appenders you have configured.  Don't forget to turn debug logs back off when you are done for performance reasons.  
 
 
P.S. You can also use environment overrides so debug messages are logged on your development machine, but not on higher environments. 

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