how to suppress MyFaces console html warnings?

Question

We are getting ready to move our JSF 2 (MyFaces with Facelets pages) application to Production soon. Currently our console logs (SystemOut.log on WebSphere v8) are filling up with vast amounts of these kinds of messages:

[3/26/13 16:42:33:744 CDT] 00000031 HtmlImageRend W   Component UIGraphic Form:errorIconSave has no attribute alt or attribute resolves to null. Path to component {Component-Path : [Class: javax.faces.component.UIViewRoot,ViewId: /view/groupagreement/products/volumebased/VolumeBasedProducts.xhtml][Class: javax.faces.component.html.HtmlBody,Id: commonLayoutId][Class: javax.faces.component.html.HtmlPanelGrid,Id: j_id1364021679_785179b][Class: javax.faces.component.html.HtmlForm,Id: Form][Class: javax.faces.component.html.HtmlBody,Id: j_id363369746_1d362e8b][Class: javax.faces.component.html.HtmlPanelGrid,Id: j_id363369746_1d362e61][Class: org.richfaces.component.UIRegion,Id: j_id363369746_1d362e4a][Class: org.richfaces.component.UIPopupPanel,Id: confirmationPopUpForWayFinder][Class: javax.faces.component.html.HtmlPanelGrid,Id: j_id363369746_1d362ffd][Class: javax.faces.component.html.HtmlPanelGrid,Id: j_id363369746_1d362fbc][Class: javax.faces.component.html.HtmlPanelGrid,Id: j_id363369746_1d362f9a][Class: javax.faces.component.html.HtmlPanelGrid,Id: j_id363369746_1d362f70][Class: javax.faces.component.html.HtmlGraphicImage,Id: errorIconSave]}
[3/26/13 16:42:33:746 CDT] 00000031 HtmlResponseW W   HTML nesting warning on closing div: element td rendered by component : {Component-Path : [Class: javax.faces.component.UIViewRoot,ViewId: /view/groupagreement/products/volumebased/VolumeBasedProducts.xhtml][Class: javax.faces.component.html.HtmlBody,Id: commonLayoutId][Class: javax.faces.component.html.HtmlPanelGrid,Id: j_id1364021679_785179b]} not explicitly closed

We feel this excessive logging may be hurting performance. While we understand that we should have coded our application propertly to html spec, it was delivered by an offshore vendor and we did not have as much control over the quality of the code as we'd like. At this point we probably don't have time to fix all the xhtml files (adding alt attribute to images, etc.).

Is there any way we can disable this logging? For example a web.xml context param? I could not find anything in MyFaces documentation.

Answer 1

I was able to solve this myself.

I looked into the source code for the MyFaces components that were generating these warnings (e.g. grepcode source link for HtmlResponseWriterImpl). From the source it's pretty obvious that there is no other configuration parameter being checked before printing these warnings. But of course the java.util.logging levels are being checked. So the solution is simply to configure java.util.logging (aka jul or jdk logging) to suppress warnings from these components.

I could have tried to configure the jdk logging configuration file in our WebSphere instance, but this is a much more difficult change to deploy & manage in our production environment (shared infrastructure, locked down servers). So I ended up using a java solution - a class that I register as a Spring bean, whose init method changes the logging level of the logger names it's provided:

<bean id="setJdkLoggingToSevere" class="ca.mycompany.myapp.util.JdkLoggingLevelConfigurer" init-method="init">
    <property name="level" value="SEVERE" />
    <property name="loggerNames">
        <list>
            <value>org.apache.myfaces.shared.renderkit.html.HtmlResponseWriterImpl</value>
            <value>org.apache.myfaces.renderkit.html.HtmlImageRenderer</value>
            <value>org.apache.myfaces.renderkit.html.ext.HtmlImageRenderer</value>
            <value>org.apache.myfaces.shared.renderkit.html.HtmlImageRendererBase</value>
            <value>org.apache.myfaces.shared_tomahawk.renderkit.html.HtmlImageRendererBase</value>
            <value>org.apache.myfaces.renderkit.html.HtmlLabelRenderer</value>
            <value>org.apache.myfaces.renderkit.html.HtmlGridRenderer</value>
            <value>org.apache.myfaces.renderkit.html.ext.HtmlGridRenderer</value>
            <value>org.apache.myfaces.shared.renderkit.html.HtmlGridRendererBase</value>
            <value>org.apache.myfaces.shared_tomahawk.renderkit.html.HtmlGridRendererBase</value>
            <value>org.apache.myfaces.shared.renderkit.html.HtmlRendererUtils</value>
            <value>org.apache.myfaces.shared_tomahawk.renderkit.html.HtmlRendererUtils</value>
        </list>
    </property>
</bean>

Here's the relevant method from my JdkLoggingLevelConfigurer class (note myLogger is a slf4j logger, since slf4j is my application's logging framework):

public void init() {
    if (this.getLoggerNames() != null) {

        Level level = Level.parse(this.getLevel());

        for (String loggerName : loggerNames) {
            Logger logger = Logger.getLogger(loggerName);
            if (logger != null) {
                myLogger.info("setting jdk logging for {} to {}", loggerName, level);
                logger.setLevel(level);
                this.loggers.add(logger);
            }
            else {
                myLogger.warn("unable to set jdk logging for {} to {} because logger was null",
                        loggerName, this.getLevel());
            }
        }
    }
}

With the above in place, we no longer see the warning messages. And if I missed any myfaces components that do emit warnings (I initially did miss some), they can easily be added to the spring configuration.