language agnostic - Conditional logging with minimal cyclomatic complexity

Question

After reading "What’s your/a good limit for cyclomatic complexity?", I realize many of my colleagues were quite annoyed with this new QA policy on our project: no more 10 cyclomatic complexity per function.

Meaning: no more than 10 'if', 'else', 'try', 'catch' and other code workflow branching statement. Right. As I explained in 'Do you test private method?', such a policy has many good side-effects.

But: At the beginning of our (200 people - 7 years long) project, we were happily logging (and no, we can not easily delegate that to some kind of 'Aspect-oriented programming' approach for logs).

myLogger.info("A String");
myLogger.fine("A more complicated String");
...

And when the first versions of our System went live, we experienced huge memory problem not because of the logging (which was at one point turned off), but because of the log parameters (the strings), which are always calculated, then passed to the 'info()' or 'fine()' functions, only to discover that the level of logging was 'OFF', and that no logging were taking place!

So QA came back and urged our programmers to do conditional logging. Always.

if(myLogger.isLoggable(Level.INFO) { myLogger.info("A String");
if(myLogger.isLoggable(Level.FINE) { myLogger.fine("A more complicated String");
...

But now, with that 'can-not-be-moved' 10 cyclomatic complexity level per function limit, they argue that the various logs they put in their function is felt as a burden, because each "if(isLoggable())" is counted as +1 cyclomatic complexity!

So if a function has 8 'if', 'else' and so on, in one tightly-coupled not-easily-shareable algorithm, and 3 critical log actions... they breach the limit even though the conditional logs may not be really part of said complexity of that function...

How would you address this situation ?
I have seen a couple of interesting coding evolution (due to that 'conflict') in my project, but I just want to get your thoughts first.

---

Thank you for all the answers.
I must insist that the problem is not 'formatting' related, but 'argument evaluation' related (evaluation that can be very costly to do, just before calling a method which will do nothing)
So when a wrote above "A String", I actually meant aFunction(), with aFunction() returning a String, and being a call to a complicated method collecting and computing all kind of log data to be displayed by the logger... or not (hence the issue, and the obligation to use conditional logging, hence the actual issue of artificial increase of 'cyclomatic complexity'...)

I now get the 'variadic function' point advanced by some of you (thank you John).
Note: a quick test in java6 shows that my varargs function does evaluate its arguments before being called, so it can not be applied for function call, but for 'Log retriever object' (or 'function wrapper'), on which the toString() will only be called if needed. Got it.

I have now posted my experience on this topic.
I will leave it there until next Tuesday for voting, then I will select one of your answers.
Again, thank you for all the suggestions :)

Answer 1

With current logging frameworks, the question is moot

Current logging frameworks like slf4j or log4j 2 don't require guard statements in most cases. They use a parameterized log statement so that an event can be logged unconditionally, but message formatting only occurs if the event is enabled. Message construction is performed as needed by the logger, rather than pre-emptively by the application.

If you have to use an antique logging library, you can read on to get more background and a way to retrofit the old library with parameterized messages.

Are guard statements really adding complexity?

Consider excluding logging guards statements from the cyclomatic complexity calculation.

It could be argued that, due to their predictable form, conditional logging checks really don't contribute to the complexity of the code.

Inflexible metrics can make an otherwise good programmer turn bad. Be careful!

Assuming that your tools for calculating complexity can't be tailored to that degree, the following approach may offer a work-around.

The need for conditional logging

I assume that your guard statements were introduced because you had code like this:

private static final Logger log = Logger.getLogger(MyClass.class);

Connection connect(Widget w, Dongle d, Dongle alt) 
  throws ConnectionException
{
  log.debug("Attempting connection of dongle " + d + " to widget " + w);
  Connection c;
  try {
    c = w.connect(d);
  } catch(ConnectionException ex) {
    log.warn("Connection failed; attempting alternate dongle " + d, ex);
    c = w.connect(alt);
  }
  log.debug("Connection succeeded: " + c);
  return c;
}

In Java, each of the log statements creates a new StringBuilder, and invokes the toString() method on each object concatenated to the string. These toString() methods, in turn, are likely to create StringBuilder instances of their own, and invoke the toString() methods of their members, and so on, across a potentially large object graph. (Before Java 5, it was even more expensive, since StringBuffer was used, and all of its operations are synchronized.)

This can be relatively costly, especially if the log statement is in some heavily-executed code path. And, written as above, that expensive message formatting occurs even if the logger is bound to discard the result because the log level is too high.

This leads to the introduction of guard statements of the form:

  if (log.isDebugEnabled())
    log.debug("Attempting connection of dongle " + d + " to widget " + w);

With this guard, the evaluation of arguments d and w and the string concatenation is performed only when necessary.

A solution for simple, efficient logging

However, if the logger (or a wrapper that you write around your chosen logging package) takes a formatter and arguments for the formatter, the message construction can be delayed until it is certain that it will be used, while eliminating the guard statements and their cyclomatic complexity.

public final class FormatLogger
{

  private final Logger log;

  public FormatLogger(Logger log)
  {
    this.log = log;
  }

  public void debug(String formatter, Object... args)
  {
    log(Level.DEBUG, formatter, args);
  }

  … &c. for info, warn; also add overloads to log an exception …

  public void log(Level level, String formatter, Object... args)
  {
    if (log.isEnabled(level)) {
      /* 
       * Only now is the message constructed, and each "arg"
       * evaluated by having its toString() method invoked.
       */
      log.log(level, String.format(formatter, args));
    }
  }

}

class MyClass 
{

  private static final FormatLogger log = 
     new FormatLogger(Logger.getLogger(MyClass.class));

  Connection connect(Widget w, Dongle d, Dongle alt) 
    throws ConnectionException
  {
    log.debug("Attempting connection of dongle %s to widget %s.", d, w);
    Connection c;
    try {
      c = w.connect(d);
    } catch(ConnectionException ex) {
      log.warn("Connection failed; attempting alternate dongle %s.", d);
      c = w.connect(alt);
    }
    log.debug("Connection succeeded: %s", c);
    return c;
  }

}

Now, none of the cascading toString() calls with their buffer allocations will occur unless they are necessary! This effectively eliminates the performance hit that led to the guard statements. One small penalty, in Java, would be auto-boxing of any primitive type arguments you pass to the logger.

The code doing the logging is arguably even cleaner than ever, since untidy string concatenation is gone. It can be even cleaner if the format strings are externalized (using a ResourceBundle), which could also assist in maintenance or localization of the software.

Further enhancements

Also note that, in Java, a MessageFormat object could be used in place of a "format" String, which gives you additional capabilities such as a choice format to handle cardinal numbers more neatly. Another alternative would be to implement your own formatting capability that invokes some interface that you define for "evaluation", rather than the basic toString() method.