Getting class name for logging

If you initialize the logger this way:

private static Logger logger = Logger.getLogger(MyClass.class.getName())>

then the name of the class will be present in every logging event, you don't need to explicitly put it in every log call:

logger.error("Error occured while doing this and that");

The you can configure the logging service (in logging.properties in case of java.util.logging, or log4j.properties if you use Apache log4j) to include the class name in every log message.

Java 8 Solution

import org.slf4j.Logger;
import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory;
import java.lang.invoke.MethodHandles;
...

private final static Logger LOG = 
                     LoggerFactory.getLogger(MethodHandles.lookup().lookupClass());

You can set up your logging parameters in log4j.xml itself.

For exp -

<appender name="swcd-web" class="org.apache.log4j.DailyRollingFileAppender">
    <param name="Threshold" value="DEBUG"/>
    <param name="Append" value="true"/>
    <param name="File" value="${catalina.home}/logs/swcd-web.log"/>
    <layout class="org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout">
        <param name="ConversionPattern" value="%d [%t] %-5p %c - %m%n"/>
    </layout>
</appender>

It would log exceptions like this in swcd-web.log file -

2012-05-23 16:34:51,632 [main] ERROR com.idc.sage.sso.dynamo.SsoDbStorage - cannot get configuration for max SSO age