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Logging in Selenium

Any application is incomplete until it's activities are traceable. Here comes the use of logging. By logging important actions you can later on track anything you want especially when there are some error situations. It becomes easy to debug the issues if logs are generated properly.

 Similarly, it is very important that our automation framework generates logs so that whenever any test fails, we can track the issue by tracing it's logs.

 In this post, I will be explaining you how we can log using log4net in selenium. Before using methods of this library we need to configure this to our application. Let's do this first then.

Configuring log4net in selenium:

First of all you need to download this library so that this can be used. You can read about log4net and then download it from this link and save the dll file after extracting it to folder that is under your project folder.

 After downloading this library you need to add references of this in you project. To do this follow below steps:
  • In TestFramework project right click on "References" and then select "Add Reference" option. 
  • After this, browse log4net.dll file and press ok. 

 Now, as we have successfully added log4net references to our project, we are ready to use it in our application.

Let's create a basic code

Create a "Log" class in TestFramework as shown below:

After this, you can call "Write" property of Log class whenever you want to log. E.g. we can log entered username and password whenever login method is called as shown below:

Before above logging statements executes, we need to call "Configure()" method of Log class so that logging can be done. This method must be called once for a test execution.

 Let's place this calling statement in "ClassInitialization" method for now as shown below:

Now, when you execute any test which calls login method you can see below console log after execution:



 This is it. You have just successfully logged from your application.

 In this example, I have used info level of logging but you can use any log level based on the kind of current situation of application. I am not going through in details about levels as you can get it easily from anywhere if you want to learn this.

 Below are the levels which are mostly used during logging.

If you have read about log4net from the link I provided to you, you must be knowing that we have just logged to console. But, this is not just enough what a test framework should have. It is important to log to files in order to get it's maximum benefit.

 So, let's see how can we configure log4net so that it can be used to log to files. I will be continuing this in my next post so that you can first practice with this basic console logging before going for next one.

 Thanks for reading this post. See you in the next post. Cya.



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