Programming Jabber

Custom Configuration

Apart from the host filter declaration, every other tag within a <log/> definition can be regarded as configuration. Taking each tag in turn, we have:

<logtype/>

This tag declares which types of logging record will be handled by this logging definition. Actually, the <logtype/> tag is more of a filter (like <host/>) than configuration, but that’s splitting hairs.

The tag can either be empty or contain one of the following values: alert, notice, record, or warn. You can specify more than one <logtype/> tag to capture more than one log type. If you specify an empty tag (as is the case with the log component here), then all log types will be captured and handled apart from any log types that are explicitly declared elsewhere in other logging components. What does this mean? Well, in our case, since we have a second log type component, rlogger (described in the next section), that has an explicit declaration:

<logtype>record</logtype>

this log component won’t receive record type log records to handle.

<format/>

A logging component will typically write out the data it receives in a human-readable format. With the <format/> tag, we can specify how the data appears. There are four variables that we can embellish with whatever text we like to form something that will be meaningful to us (and perhaps easily parseable for our scripts). The four variables are shown in Table 4-4.

Table 4-4. Logging component variables for <format/>

Variable	Description
%d