Expand entries that contain newlines to fit

If you think LogMX needs a new useful feature!
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Ian Gralinski
Posts: 18
Joined: Fri May 20, 2016 12:17 am
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Expand entries that contain newlines to fit

Post by Ian Gralinski »

We have log files where some entries contain newline characters. When viewing these, only the first line is visible in the main window. It would be nice if entries automatically expanded to fit the entire entry.

As an example:
[Timestamp], [Thread], [Emitter], [Level], some text
continuation of the line
admin
Site Admin
Posts: 555
Joined: Sun Dec 17, 2006 10:30 pm

Re: Expand entries that contain newlines to fit

Post by admin »

Hello Ian,

Thank you for your feedback. You are right, it would be great, but unfortunately, our current GUI framework doesn't allow having one table row taller than the others. Yet, you can always choose the height you want for your rows but all rows will use this height: to do so, go to menu "Tools", "Options", tab "Display", option "Lines of text per log entry".

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

Re: Expand entries that contain newlines to fit

Post by jpierce »

This was a bit frustrating to find out. We're evaluating LogMX right now, and this is a pretty important feature. Infrequently but importantly there are some multi-line entries like stack traces. There's no use in having every log line be multiline.

Perhaps as a workable compromise that won't require you to totally change frameworks, there could be some icon added to rows where lines have not been displayed due to row height. This would make it obvious that clicking on the line would show the full data in the Message section.
admin
Site Admin
Posts: 555
Joined: Sun Dec 17, 2006 10:30 pm

Re: Expand entries that contain newlines to fit

Post by admin »

Hello,

Yes, I understand. I feel like it's a tricky situation, I'm not sure what's the best approach, because when I use spreadsheets like Excel or Google Sheets, I'm never really satisfied, especially when there are big (tall) cells, scrolling is painful because it will scroll giant by cell at a time to avoid cutting a cell in half, and then sometimes the cell is not tall enough, sometime too tall, I feel like I spend too much time dealing with cells size.

But I agree that not being able to change the cell height is frustrating too. Sadly, adding an icon if there's more text out of the cell would have an impact on performance when scrolling the table content, because it would need to be done for all the visible cells at a very fast pace (such text-wrapping computations are not fast, especially when not built-in in the UI framework). We could think that doing it only when the cell is selected would be fine, but then it's useless, because if the cell is selected, the entry details panel at the bottom will already show the extra content... Also, we could argue that for columns that are not usually wide (e.g. date, thread), having this icon if the text doesn't fit would be even worse, because in this case a pretty good portion of this small cell would be hidden by this icon just to tell you that some content cannot be shown.

I'm still not sure what the best approach would be, feel free to let me know.

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

Re: Expand entries that contain newlines to fit

Post by jpierce »

Thanks for the reply. What I figured out is that I might add a user defined column that could have an "X" or "..." in it to indicate that there's data being hidden. It's not as pretty and flashy, but I think it'd get the job done.
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