General Design Issues 

·        Structure of messages

As part of the application design phase it is a good practice to list the possible messages or, if possible, design a common pattern for the message layout, to keep them as uniform as possible. The basic goal behind this is, to provide as much and as uniform as possible the content described in Content of Log Messages and Content of Trace Messages topics.

Since messages need to be translatable, it is a good practice to avoid abbreviations, complex sentences or messages concatenated out of multiple parts.

·        Target groups and delivery channels

In general there are multiple delivery channels for messages: A message can be stored in log and/or it can be delivered directly to the user interface informing the application user. A rule of thumb is that technical infrastructure-related information must not be delivered to the user interface, since mostly the application user cannot handle the problem. For application-related information it is more difficult to find the appropriate information channel: If the message should normally be handled by the application user, it must be delivered to the user interface, whereas if the message needs post-processing (for example, by the application operation group), it needs to be written to a log and probably also sent to the user interface.

·        Further hints

Do not configure the logging API inside of your application code overwriting a configuration made in the corresponding tool. Instead, deliver a default configuration file (XML- file) as part of your development or software component.