log4net is capturing everything except the stack trace

Question

I'm totally new to Log4Net. I've been able to implement the below code that I found online. It's working fine in terms of capturing and saving data, i.e. date, the logged user, ip address,...

The only problem is that the Exception field is being blank. I want to capture the stack trace.

public void Application_Error(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        //Fires when an error occurs
        var redirectUrl = "~/Error/GenericError.aspx";
        var httpException = (HttpException)Server.GetLastError();
        int httpCode = httpException.GetHttpCode();

        log4net.GlobalContext.Properties("ipaddress") 
                                    = Request.ServerVariables("remote_addr");
        log4net.GlobalContext.Properties("thread") = Request.Url.AbsoluteUri;
        log4net.GlobalContext.Properties("userid") = User.Identity.Name;

        var ctx = HttpContext.Current;
        var _url = ctx.Request.Url.ToString();
        log4net.GlobalContext.Properties("url") = _url;
        log4net.GlobalContext.Properties("browser") = ctx.Request.Browser.Browser;

        log4net.ILog log = log4net.LogManager.GetLogger(this.GetType());
        log.Error(httpException.Message);


        if ((httpCode == 404))
        {
            redirectUrl = "~/Error/FileNotFound.aspx";
        }
        else if ((httpCode == 403))
        {
            redirectUrl = "~/Error/UnauthorizedAccess.aspx";
        }
        else
        {
            var message = string.Empty;
            if (httpException is HttpRequestValidationException)
            {
                message = "A potentially dangerous Request.Form value"
                                    + " was detected from the client.";
            }
            else
            {
                message = httpException.Message;
            }
            redirectUrl = "~/Error/GenericError.aspx?msg=" + message;
        }

        Server.ClearError();
        Server.Transfer(redirectUrl);
    }

This is the log4net portion of webconfig

 <parameter>
    <parameterName value="@exception" />
    <dbType value="String" />
    <size value="2000" />
    <layout type="log4net.Layout.ExceptionLayout" />
  </parameter>

Thanks for helping

There's a field in the table called Exception. changing the line to the answer provided by @stuartd, `message` and `exception` fields are being populated now. — Richard77, May 17 '16 at 14:43

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered May 17 '16 at 14:01

You need to use the overload of Error that lets you pass the exception along with the message:

Log a message object with the Error level including the stack trace of the Exception passed as a parameter.

So your code would be:

log.Error("Error in global handler", httpException); // or other message

log4net is capturing everything except the stack trace

1 Answers1