Control myBatis logs destination file and level

Question

I'm working on a spring-based application which has to communicate with a SQL database through mybatis: all right but the logs destination.

For some reason mybatis logs to the wrong file, could you help me to figure out why? Here's my configuration:

log4j.properties:

### Appenders
# Console appender
log4j.appender.console=org.apache.log4j.ConsoleAppender
log4j.appender.console.Threshold=WARN
log4j.appender.console.layout=org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout

# Application file appender
log4j.appender.main=org.apache.log4j.RollingFileAppender
log4j.appender.main.File=logs/app.log
log4j.appender.main.layout=org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout
log4j.appender.main.MaxFileSize=10MB
log4j.appender.main.MaxBackupIndex=15

# Libs file appender
log4j.appender.libs=org.apache.log4j.RollingFileAppender
log4j.appender.libs.File=logs/app_libs.log
log4j.appender.libs.layout=org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout
log4j.appender.libs.MaxFileSize=10MB
log4j.appender.libs.MaxBackupIndex=15



### Loggers & additivity
# Application
log4j.additivity.our.company.basepackage=false
log4j.logger.our.company.basepackage=TRACE,main,console


# Root logger
log4j.rootLogger=INFO,libs

pom.xml snippet

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
    <artifactId>slf4j-api</artifactId>
    <version>1.7.5</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
    <artifactId>jcl-over-slf4j</artifactId>
    <version>1.7.5</version>
    <scope>runtime</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
    <artifactId>slf4j-log4j12</artifactId>
    <version>1.7.5</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>log4j</groupId>
    <artifactId>log4j</artifactId>
    <version>1.2.17</version>
    <scope>runtime</scope>
</dependency>

I find TRACE-level rows of mybatis ("org.apache.ibatis.logging.jdbc.BaseJdbcLogger.trace(BaseJdbcLogger.java:145)") in the file "app.log".

I excluded commons-logging from spring-core, and with a dependency tree I don't see commons-logging. Why isn't mybatis logging to the file "app_libs.log"? Why does mybatis not respect the specified level?

Thank you.

Edit 1

The code with which the database gets queried has been generated with mybatis-generator, and the generated code lives somewhere under the package "our.company.basepackage".

Answer 1

Since the question was posted, I didn't stop to think about this, until now: I found the reason of that behaviour.

The decisive suggestion is that "the code has been generated with mybatis-generator", and it has been generated in the same subpackage of the application: this means that the *Mapper classes, used for querying the databaes, effectively are in the application package and so their logs are treated as logs of "our.company.basepackage" and not as logs of "org.apache.ibatis".

The "org.apache.ibatis" in logs rows was misleading me.

After this small insight, I added the following to my log4j.properties:

log4j.additivity.our.company.basepackage.persistence.mybatis=false
log4j.logger.our.company.basepackage.persistence.mybatis=INFO,libs

With these 2 more lines, everything works properly, i.e. no more "org.apache.ibatis" rows in app.log.

I hope that this can be useful to someone other using mybatis-generator.