Tracing mechanism in Windows Communication Foundation is based on the
classes that resides in System.Diagnostic namespace.Important classes are Trace,
TraceSource and TraceListener.
Following are the steps to enable tracing
in WCF:
1. Configuring WCF to emit tracing information/Define Trace Source,
we have the following options:
System.ServiceModel
System.ServiceModel.MessageLogging
System.ServiceModel.IdentityModel
System.ServiceModel.Activation
System.Runtime.Serialization
System.IO.Log
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In configuration file, we will define a source to
enable this configuration as follows:
2. Setting Tracing Level, we have the
following available options, we need to set this tracing level to available
options other than default "Off":
Off
Critical
Error
Warning
Information
Verbose
ActivityTracing
All
In configuration file, we can choose above
values for switchValue attribute as follows:
switchValue=”Information”>
3. Configuring a trace listener
For configuring a trace listener, we will add
following to config file.
type="System.Diagnostics.XmlWriterTraceListener"
initializeData="d:\logs\messages.svclog"
/>
logEntireMessage: By default,
only the message header is logged but if we set it to true, entire message
including message header as well as body will be
logged. logMalformedMessages: this option log messages those
are rejected by WCF stack at any stage are known as malformed
messages. logMessagesAtServiceLevel: messages those are about
to enter or leave user code. logMessagesAtTransportLevel:
messages those are about to encode or decode. maxMessagesToLog:
maximum quota for messages. Default value is
10000. maxSizeOfMessageToLog: message size in bytes.
Putting all this together, configuration file
will appear like this.
Note: In this case, information will be
buffered and not published to file automatically, So, we can set the autoflush
property of the trace under sources as follows:
