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NAME

Log::Message::Structured - Simple structured log messages

SYNOPSIS

    package MyLogEvent;
    use Moose;
    use namespace::autoclean;

    # Note: you MUST implement a 'stringify' method, or compose a role
    #       that gives you a stringify method.
    with qw/
        Log::Message::Structured
        Log::Message::Structured::Stringify::AsJSON
    /;

    has foo => ( is => 'ro', required => 1 );

    ... elsewhere ...

    use aliased 'My::Log::Event';

    $logger->log(message => Event->new( foo => "bar" ));
    # Logs:
    {"__CLASS__":"MyLogEvent","foo":1,"date":"2010-03-28T23:15:52Z","hostname":"mymachine.domain"}

DESCRIPTION

Logging lines to a file is a fairly useful and traditional way of recording what's going on in your application.

However, if you have another use for the same sort of data (for example, sending to another process via a message queue, or storing in KiokuDB), then you can be needlessly repeating your data marshalling.

Log::Message::Structured is a VERY VERY SIMPLE set of roles to help you make small structured classes which represent 'something which happened', that you can then either pass around in your application, log in a traditional manor as a log line, or serialize to JSON for transmission over the network.

ATTRIBUTES

The basic Log::Message::Structured role provides the following read only attributes:

hostname

The host name of the host the event was generated on. Defaults to the hostname as returned by Sys::Hostname.

epochtime

The date and time on which the event occurred, as an no of seconds since Jan 1st 1970 (i.e. the output of time())

date

The date and time on which the event occured, as an ISO8601 date time string (from MooseX::Types::ISO8601). Defaults to the time the object is constructed.

METHODS

The only non-accessor methods provided are those composed from MooseX::Storage related to serialization and deserialization.

freeze

Return the instance as a JSON string.

thaw

Inflate an instance of the class from a JSON string.

pack

Return the instance data as a plain data structure (hashref).

pack

Inflate an instance from a plain data structure (hashref).

BUILD

An empty build method (which will be silently discarded if you have one in your class) is provided, and is wrapped to make sure all attributes are inflated at construction time.

REQUIRED METHODS

stringify

You must implement a stringify method, or compose a stringification role for all Log::Message::Structured events. This is so that events will always be meaningfully loggable be printing them to STDOUT or STDERR, or logging them in a traditional way in a file.

A note about namespace::autoclean

namespace::autoclean does not work correctly with roles that supply overloading. Therefore you should instead use:

    use namespace::clean -except => 'meta';

instead in all classes using Log::Message::Structured.

SEE ALSO

Log::Message::Structured::Stringify::Sprintf
Log::Message::Structured::Stringify::JSON

AUTHOR AND COPYRIGHT

Tomas Doran (t0m) <bobtfish@bobtfish.net>.

LICENSE

Licensed under the same terms as perl itself.