Why does nlog keep more than the requested number of archive files?

Question

0.00/5 (No votes)

See more:

I have the NLog configuration below:

<target
    name="MyLog"
    xsi:type="File"
    fileName="./Logs/${shortdate:cached=true}.txt"
    layout="${message}"
    archiveFileName="./Logs/Archive/${longdate}-{##}.txt"
    archiveOldFileOnStartup="true"
    archiveNumbering="DateAndSequence"
    maxArchiveFiles="2">
</target>

It creates one log file in the /Logs directory and this file is moved to the ./Logs/Archive directory each time the application runs. The problem is that I just get more and more archived files. Can anyone tell me what I am doing wrong to cause it not to honour the maximum-archived-files setting?

What I have tried:

Various file-naming settings for the main file and the archived files. Nothing seems to get it to honour the request to keep only two archived files.

Posted 17-May-17 2:10am

Patrick Skelton

Updated 18-May-17 14:13pm

Add a Solution

Comments

F-ES Sitecore 17-May-17 10:18am

Try an archiveNumbering that doesn't use date.

Patrick Skelton 17-May-17 13:03pm

Thank you for the answer.

That does indeed only keep the required number of log files. One oddity is that, despite what the documentation says, archiveNumbering="Rolling" and archiveNumbering="Sequence" seem identical - i.e. the higher-numbered archived file contains later messages than the lower-numbered archived file. This seems like too big a bug to have gone unnoticed, so I guess I am doing something else wrong.

1 solution

Add a Solution

Add your solution here

Treat my content as plain text, not as HTML

Preview 0

…

Existing Members

Sign in to your account

...or Join us

Download, Vote, Comment, Publish.

Your Email
Password
Forgot your password?

Your Email
This email is in use. Do you need your password?
Optional Password

I have read and agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
Please subscribe me to the CodeProject newsletters

When answering a question please:

Read the question carefully.
Understand that English isn't everyone's first language so be lenient of bad spelling and grammar.
If a question is poorly phrased then either ask for clarification, ignore it, or edit the question and fix the problem. Insults are not welcome.
Don't tell someone to read the manual. Chances are they have and don't get it. Provide an answer or move on to the next question.

Let's work to help developers, not make them feel stupid.

This content, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)

Rolf Kristensen · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-18T14:13:00

Solution 1

You should remove "${longdate}" from the archiveFileName. The place-holder "{##}" will automatically insert date and sequence-number.

Instead use the File-Target parameter archiveDateFormat to control the date-layout used inside the place-holder.

Posted 18-May-17 14:13pm

Rolf Kristensen

Comments

Patrick Skelton 20-May-17 4:47am

For a while, I couldn't get this to work. Turned out to be my trying to use colons in the date format, which I did escape with a backslash as mentioned in the docs. Still didn't work. Anyway, switching to hyphens got it working.

I still don't really see why the archiving needs to be mutually exclusive with having any kind of a time-stamp in the main file, given how easy I found it to write C# code to do what I wanted it to do. But thank you very much for the help.

Rolf Kristensen 20-May-17 5:25am

The NLog archive-logic includes cleanup of old files, and it uses file-wildcard to recognize what files to remove. If using "random" filenames (ex. longdate), then the file-wildcard will fail.