ability to save enabled emitter state

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jpierce
Posts: 51
Joined: Thu Mar 21, 2019 3:51 pm

ability to save enabled emitter state

Post by jpierce »

You can currently save and load filtering states. I wish you could save and load the state of which emitters are turned on. Right now, every time I load these massive application debug logs with lots of different types of stuff, I have to go back and pare down all the noisy emitters I don't care about right now. Unfortunately, it's not as simply as "turn off all INFO emitters", as in other situations, those lines are important. So they have INFO, TRACE, DEBUG, ERROR, etc. levels. But when I'm trying to solve a problem in one area of the functionality, I just want a certain set of emitters on for each log file.
admin
Site Admin
Posts: 555
Joined: Sun Dec 17, 2006 10:30 pm

Re: ability to save enabled emitter state

Post by admin »

Hello,

Maybe there's something I missed something, but from what I understand, what you are trying to do is already possible through the "Filtering state" feature. As you said, you can save/load filtering state, but the thing is for each Filtering state, you can define the list of emitter to silence (to "hide"), and the verbosity for each emitter as well (e.g. only WARN/ERROR for this level). And then when such a Filtering State is saved (e.g. menu "Filter" > "Filtering States" > "Save current filtering state"), you can then just re-load it at anytime to re-apply the same filtering settings (hidden emitters + emitters verbosity).

Here is an example:
Image

Please let me know if I missed something.

Xavier
jpierce
Posts: 51
Joined: Thu Mar 21, 2019 3:51 pm

Re: ability to save enabled emitter state

Post by jpierce »

Very interesting, Xavier. I had actually tried to save it as a filtering state and it told me nothing was filtered. So I thought that must only apply to ACTUAL filters (that you get by pressing the show filtering bar button).

I think the paradigm is just the opposite from what I was expecting. I was expecting a "show only these emitters" paradigm, whereas this is "hide all these emitters". Mostly that's the same, but if you set up the filter on one log file that just happens not to have certain types of entries (or if those entries get added later), you wind up with those being shown now by default and you have to hide them and re-save your filtering state. I think I can make this work, though.

I was also kind of hoping it would preserve which emitters were expanded, though. :D
admin
Site Admin
Posts: 555
Joined: Sun Dec 17, 2006 10:30 pm

Re: ability to save enabled emitter state

Post by admin »

We chose to use "hide these emitters" instead of "show only these emitters" so that if at some point there is a new emitter that you didn't expect, you would not miss it. But yes, that's extra work for you in the case you actually don't need to see this new Emitter as well. In this case, you can also add a few "Filters" to your "Filtering state": at the bottom of my last screenshot, you can add filters like "Emitter is X" OR "Emitter is Y" OR "Emitter is Z" if you really need to have a white-list approach instead of a black-list approach :D

Concerning the expanded state of emitters, if you're talking about the Emitters tree at the left, for now this "expanded/collapsed" state is only persisted through "AutoRefresh" and "Reload" features, not through following file loads, even when using Filtering State. That could be a new feature, but I'm not sure when this state should be persisted?: through Filtering state only, or all the time so that loading log files would automagically restore the last known state?
jpierce
Posts: 51
Joined: Thu Mar 21, 2019 3:51 pm

Re: ability to save enabled emitter state

Post by jpierce »

I'd be fine if it was just applied when loading a filtering state.

I think your suggestion of the filters will just have to do it for having a whitelist. It's not quite as user-friendly for our users, because if you want to just add back in one other emitter, you can't just click them on and off. But that's just how it will have to be at this point.
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