ServiceStack - Simulating a stronger Scope for IRequestLogger - servicestack

Question

This is not a question about the RequestLogsService or the RequestLogFeature. It is about the ServiceRunner's call to a IRequestLogger (if one is registered at the app container).
My app has regular logging in place, I dump the app's flow to log a file.
I am now implementing a database log, inspired by the RequestLogsService. This log will contain one line per request, containing all the Request and Response data.
However my endpoint produces outputs at 4 different levels:
Custom auth filter
Validation
Service
AppHostExceptionHandler
From those 4, only the Service outputs are covered by the IRequestLogger, because its ServiceRunner related. Is there any way I can cover my 4 scenarios transparently? I want to minimize the complexity introduced in the pipeline.
Thanks

Answer 1

I encountered a similar problem recently and resolved it as follows:
Custom Auth filter
There are 2 possibilities with this one based upon the type of logging you would like. If you throw an exception in here, you can catch it by setting up an ServiceExceptionHandler in AppHost:
this.ServiceExceptionHandler = (httpRequest, request, exception) =>
{
LogData(httpRequest, exception);
return DtoUtils.HandleException(this, request, exception);
};
If that approach won't work for you or you don't throw an exception during auth, you will have to instead create a logging filter either before or after the auth filter is run. This can be done in a few different locations using either a PreRequestFilter or a RequestFilter depending on when exactly you need it to run (see ServiceStack's Order of Operations).
Validation
I'll assume you are using ServiceStack's built in FluentValidation to perform your validation. In this case, you can hook into the plugin's ErrorResponseFilter like so. Note that if you require the IHttpRequest and IHTTPresponse objects in this method, you may have to do a hack-y workaround and stash them somewhere as they aren't supplied.:
Plugins.Add(new ValidationFeature { ErrorResponseFilter = ValidationErrorResponseFilter});
...
private object ValidationError(ValidationResult validationResult, object o)
{
var httpError = o as HttpError;
LogData(httpError);
}
AppHostExceptionHandler
If the exception occurs in setup of the AppHost, you may have to settle with a simple try/catch. If the exception occurs in AppHost during the request processing however, you can use the ExceptionHandler similar to the ServiceExceptionHandler above:
this.ExceptionHandler = (httpReq, httpRes, operationName, ex) =>
{
LogData(httpReq, httpRes);
}
In conclusion, if all of this doesn't work or is too much code in too many places, you can instead resort to overriding one or more methods in ServiceRunner to get what you need. In my case I overrode OnAfterExecute to log every request that made it to the service handler and then only had to add the exception handler to FluentValidation as noted above.