Function Targets

Function Targets

Function targets provide a way to customize the behavior of stumpless, providing your own logic and functionality in situations where the provided target types don’t meet your needs. This isn’t limited to writing logs to a special format though, you could do anything! In this example, we’ll use it to increment a counter for events that meet a certain criteria.

Our example application counts the balls of each color found in a ball pit. Each ball is logged as it is processed, and at the end a count for all of the colors is displayed. We’ll use a custom function to keep track of them as they are logged, so that our ball processing logic can focus on whatever it’s doing.

First, we need to write our counting function itself. This is pretty straightforward - we grab the ball color from the entry, and increment the appropriate counter.

int
count_balls( const struct stumpless_target *target,
             const struct stumpless_entry *entry ) {
  const char *color;
  int result;

  color = stumpless_get_entry_param_value_by_name( entry, "ball", "color" );
  if( strcmp( color, "red" ) == 0 ) {
    result = ++red_count;
  } else if( strcmp( color, "green" ) == 0 ) {
    result = ++green_count;
  } else if( strcmp( color, "blue" ) == 0 ) {
    result = ++blue_count;
  } else {
    result = -1;
  }

  free( ( void * ) color );
  return result;
}

In our main application, we’ll need to create a function target using our function to send logs to.

target = stumpless_open_function_target( "ball-counter", count_balls );

And finally, whenever we process a ball we’ll send an entry to our target. Each time this happens our function gets called, keeping track of the ball colors.

stumpless_set_entry_param_value_by_name( entry, "ball", "color", color );
stumpless_add_entry( target, entry );

And that’s all there is to it! While function targets are very simple, they can be used for a lot of powerful things, and are handy to have available.