Serilog serializing fields

Question

If I have the following class

public class Customer
{
    public string Name;
}

and then have the following log command in Serilog

Log.Logger = new LoggerConfiguration()
    .WriteTo.Console()
    .WriteTo.Seq("http://localhost:5341")
    .CreateLogger();

var item = new Customer();
item.Name = "John";
Serilog.Log.Information("Customer {@item}", item);

The log just displays in Seq as

Customer {}

If I change the Name field to a property it works but I would prefer not to do that at this stage. Is there any way around it?

Answer 1

To do this just for the one type (recommended), you can use:

.Destructure.ByTransforming<Customer>(c => new { c.Name })

If you want to include public fields for all types, or those matching some kind of condition, you can plug in a policy to do it:

class IncludePublicFieldsPolicy : IDestructuringPolicy
{
    public bool TryDestructure(
        object value,
        ILogEventPropertyValueFactory propertyValueFactory,
        out LogEventPropertyValue result)
    {
        if (!(value is SomeBaseType))
        {
            result = null;
            return false;
        }

        var fieldsWithValues = value.GetType().GetTypeInfo().DeclaredFields
            .Where(f => f.IsPublic)
            .Select(f => new LogEventProperty(f.Name,
               propertyValueFactory.CreatePropertyValue(f.GetValue(value))));

        result = new StructureValue(fieldsWithValues);
        return true;
    }
}

The example scopes this down to look at objects derived from SomeBaseType only.

You can plug it in with:

.Destructure.With<IncludePublicFieldsPolicy>()

(I think it's likely to require some tweaking, but should be a good starting point.)