Bartosz Sypytkowski

Akka.NET application logging in your browser

Bartosz Sypytkowski -

In this post I want to share with fairly simple trick - binding Akka.NET logging bus directly to browser console output. While this is mostly form of exercise, you may find it useful when you're developing system working with Akka and web sockets.

Lets start with creating our custom logger actor. Here's a starter code.

public class BrowserLogger : ReceiveActor
{
    public BrowserLogger()
    {
        Receive<Debug>(e => Log(LogLevel.Debug, e.ToString()));
        Receive<Info>(e => Log(LogLevel.Info, e.ToString()));
        Receive<Warning>(e => Log(LogLevel.Warning, e.ToString()));
        Receive<Error>(e => Log(LogLevel.Error, e.ToString()));
        Receive<InitializeLogger>(_ => Sender.Tell(new LoggerInitialized()));
    }
}

BTW: Congratulations! If you had done that, you've actually created a fully functional logger library :)

Unfortunately, devil is in the details. Now we need to integrate our logging actor with SignalR hubs. For this, lets create a dedicated Hub class, which we could use to forward log messages back to the client.


public class LoggerHub : Hub
{
    public override Task OnConnected()
    {
        Bootstrap.Register(this);
        return base.OnConnected();
    }

    public void Log(LogLevel level, string message)
    {
        Clients.All.log((int)level, message);
    }

    public override Task OnDisconnected(bool stopCalled)
    {
        Bootstrap.Unregister(this);
        return base.OnDisconnected(stopCalled);
    }
}

Don't worry, if you don't know, what Bootstrap class is all about. We're gonna cover it later.

Now, once our SingalR hub is ready, it's time to enrich our logger actor to use it for forwarding messages back to client. The idea is to simply have a list of hubs to be informed, and provide additional register/unregister message handlers from there.

// message used to register a hub
public class RegisterHub
{
    public readonly LoggerHub Hub;
    public RegisterHub(LoggerHub hub)
    {
        Hub = hub;
    }
}

// message used to unregister a hub
public sealed class UnregisterHub
{
    public readonly LoggerHub Hub;
    public UnregisterHub(LoggerHub hub)
    {
        Hub = hub;
    }
}

public class BrowserLogger : ReceiveActor
{
    private readonly ISet<LoggerHub> _hubs = new HashSet<LoggerHub>();

    public BrowserLogger()
    {
        Receive<RegisterHub>(register => _hubs.Add(register.Hub));
        Receive<UnregisterHub>(unregister => _hubs.Remove(unregister.Hub));

        ...
    }

    private void Log(LogLevel level, string message)
    {
        foreach (var hub in _hubs) hub.Log(level, message);
    }
}

Note: logging may be a risky operation, since invoking hub method may result with throwing an exception and reseting an actor. IMO in that case, the best solution is to catch an exception, wrap it with our own custom Exception to be ignored by current logger (using in example following statement: Receive<Error>(e => !(e.Cause is BrowserLoggingException), e => Log(LogLevel.Error, e.ToString()));) and propagate it using standard akka logging mechanism to other loggers in our actor system (you don't want to loose these exceptions, right?).

In one of the previous code snippets you might notice, that we're using Bootstrap.Register and Bootstrap.Unregister methods, which hasn't been defined yet. For this we create a static class used as access point to actor system and it's functionalities.

public static class Bootstrap
{
    private static ActorSystem _system;
    private static ActorSelection _logger;

    public static ActorSystem System { get { return _system; } }

    // call this method in your Startup.cs or Global.asax when application starts
    public static void Init()
    {
        _system = ActorSystem.Create("logging-system", 
            ConfigurationFactory.ParseString(@"akka.loggers = [""MyNamespace.BrowserLogger, MyAssembly""]"));
        _logger = _system.ActorSelection("/system/log*");
    }

    public static void Register(LoggerHub hub)
    {
        _logger.Tell(new RegisterHub(hub));
    }

    public static void Unregister(LoggerHub hub)
    {
        _logger.Tell(new UnregisterHub(hub));
    }
}

I think, that one thing worth notice is the way, we refer to logger actor in code above. Loggers are created internally by actor system on it's start and live on their own rights. Therefore it's hard to get any reference to them. /system/log* path may be confusing at the beginning, here's why:

  • Logger actor is part of the actor system internals (Akka.NET not only exposes actors to external users, but also uses them to manage itself). For this reason unlike usual /user prefix, here we have /system actor guardian used for internal actors.
  • Loggers names are generated and they usually take a form of log-<inc>-<logger_type_name>, where inc is auto-incremented number. Therefore it's hard to predict, what exact name of our logger will be. To omit this issue we use wildchart operator to access all actors with name prefixed with log (basically all loggers). It's not a problem, since only our BrowserLogger is able to respond on Register/Unregister messages.

The final step is to register our hub on the browser side. Assuming that you already have SignalR configured in your application, this is pretty straightforward code:

 var logLevel = {
     DEBUG: 0,
     INFO: 1,
     WARNING: 2,
     ERROR: 3
 };
 var log = $.connection.loggerHub;
 log.client.log = function (level, message) {
     switch (level) {
         case logLevel.DEBUG: console.debug(message); break;
         case logLevel.INFO: console.info(message); break;
         case logLevel.WARNING: console.warn(message); break;
         case logLevel.ERROR: console.error(message); break;
     }
 };

 $.connection.hub.start().done(function() {
     console.log('connection initialized');
 });

Final notes

Following example can be used only in local actor system scope. In cluster wide scenarios you should ensure that hub registration doesn't pass local system scope, since SignalR hubs are not simple POCOs, and cannot be freely serialized/deserialized.

Additionally remember that logging bus, just like any other Akka's event stream, works only in local scope. To publish message in cluster-wide environments you'll need to provide your own event propagation between node boundaries (it's not so hard) or use Akka.Cluster.Tools plugin (which is still in progress at the moment of writing that post).