nHibernate and NLog?

marc.winder · **Posted:** Thu Jan 17, 2008 11:51 am

I was recently placed on a project that has decided to use NLog for their logging library. However I'm pushing for nHibernate for our ORM but I can't seem to find if I can use NLog instead of log4net with nHibernate. Does anyone know if I can substitute NLog for log4net.

TIA

darioquintana · **Posted:** Sat Jan 19, 2008 12:12 pm

Hi,

You can't. NHibernate is tied to log4net.

Best regards

marc.winder · **Posted:** Mon Jan 21, 2008 9:54 am

Thank you darioquintana.

benhyrman · **Joined:** Wed Jun 21, 2006 3:13 pm **Posts:** 110

It might be worth creating a patch for nhibernate that allows you to specify a logging provider in the hibernate configuration. For kicks, I created a project around structuremap that allowed one to dynamically swap out logging frameworks at runtime... that's overkill for this, but the net result is that I learned it's rather trivial to create a common interface and implementation as a facade over nlog and log4net.

I'll look at it if I have time. I don't know enough about a lot of nhibernate to know how much work it would be, but it might be useful for others too....

or, you could argue that nhibernate is a separate, isolated subsystem and, as such, should have its own logging area anyway.

swalters · **Joined:** Wed Feb 21, 2007 10:45 am **Posts:** 2

Spring.net uses http://netcommon.sourceforge.net/. I've seen this brought up on the NHibernate dev list before and it was shot down as yet another abstraction. Maybe thoughts have changed since then.

-Shane

darioquintana · **Posted:** Sat Jan 26, 2008 12:47 am

Hi,

For example, EntityName is quite closer to be fully implemented. And there is a lot of features that need to be finish (without counting the need of documentation of these features)

CommonLogging could be interesting for a future, now it works and do it fine.

Those are my thoughts, by the way, you can send a email to the dev-list for hear what they say.

Best regards

fatal2 · **Joined:** Thu Jul 26, 2007 8:17 am **Posts:** 3

We had a very similar issue. We use NLog as our logging system and did not want to have to configure and maintain two different logging configurations.

Our solution was to build a bridging class and to configure it as the root appender for log4net.

For example:

Code:

/// <summary>uses nlog loggers to output the log messages from log4net</summary>
public class Log4NetToNLogAdaptor : IAppender
{
    public void DoAppend(LoggingEvent loggingEvent)
    {
            Logger log = NLog.LogManager.GetLogger(loggingEvent.LoggerName);
            Exception exception = loggingEvent.ExceptionObject;
            string message = loggingEvent.RenderedMessage;

            if( loggingEvent.Level >= Level.Critical )
            {
                if (exception != null)
                    log.FatalException(message, exception);
                else
                    log.Fatal(message);
            }
            else if (loggingEvent.Level >= Level.Error)
            {
                 ....
            }
            ...
    }
}

and to configure the bridge (eg: in Application_Start):

Code:

BasicConfigurator.Configure(new Log4NetToNLogAdaptor());

You can then configure log4net loggers in your nlog configuration file in the same way you would configure nlog loggers:

Code:

<logger name="NHibernate.SQL" minlevel="Debug" writeTo="trace,file" final="true"/>

regards,
Paul.

mahara · **Posted:** Fri May 20, 2011 3:13 pm

fatal2 wrote:

We had a very similar issue. We use NLog as our logging system and did not want to have to configure and maintain two different logging configurations.

Our solution was to build a bridging class and to configure it as the root appender for log4net.

Wow, it looks so simple! I never thought it could be like that.

Thanks for the sharing the solution, Paul.