Is it possible to customize azure table storage by

Question

So I'm writing a WebApi using C#, I configured log4net in my web.config (used log4net.azure) my configuration is the following:

<appender name="AzureTableAppender" type="log4net.Appender.AzureTableAppender, log4net.Appender.Azure">
  <param name="TableName" value="myLogs" />
  <param name="ConnectionStringName" value="AzureTable" />
  <param name="PropAsColumn" value="true" />
  <bufferSize value="1" />
  <param name="PartitionKeyType" value="LoggerName" />
</appender>

My issue is that I'm getting a lot of extra columns that I don't need, for now I'm getting the following:

I'm searching for a way to be able to pick which columns to be displayed and maybe add more columns but by code without going to my azure account and untick what I don't want.

Answer 1

Yes, you can control the columns to be displayed or not using code.

For example, assume that you wanna only have the 4 columns: Message / Level / RoleInstance / DeploymentId in your azure table storage, you can follow the steps:

Step 1.Create a table contanis the above 4 columns:

public class AzureLog : TableEntity
    {
        public AzureLog()
        {
            var now = DateTime.UtcNow;
            PartitionKey = string.Format("{0:yyyy-MM}", now);
            RowKey = string.Format("{0:dd HH:mm:ss.fff}-{1}", now, Guid.NewGuid());
        }

        public string RoleInstance { get; set; }
        public string DeploymentId { get; set; }    
        public string Message { get; set; }
        public string Level { get; set; }

    }

Step 2.Create a class, just use to create the table where stored your log. Here we named it Logger:

public class Logger
    {
        //Storage credentials.
        public StorageCredentials credentials = null;

        //Storage account.
        public CloudStorageAccount account = null;

        //Table client
        public CloudTableClient tableClient = null;

        //Table.
        public CloudTable table = null;

        // Constructor.
        public Logger(string tableName, string accountName, string accountKey)
        {
            //Create storage credentials object.
            credentials = new StorageCredentials(accountName,
            accountKey);

            //Create storage account object.
            account = new CloudStorageAccount(credentials, false);

            //Create table client object.
            tableClient = account.CreateCloudTableClient();

            //Get the table reference.
            table = tableClient.GetTableReference(tableName);

            //Check whether table exist or not.
            if (!table.Exists())
            {
                //Create the table if not exist.
                table.Create();
            }
        }

        // Insert into table.
        public void Insert(AzureLog objAzureLog)
        {
            // Create the new insert table operation.
            TableOperation insertOperation = TableOperation.Insert(objAzureLog);

            // Execute the insert statement.
            table.Execute(insertOperation);
        }
    }

Step 3.define your custom appender:

public class AzureLogAppender : AppenderSkeleton
    {
        //Logger object.
        private Logger objLogger = null;

        //Azure table name.
        public string tableName { get; set; }

        //Azure account name.
        public string accountName { get; set; }

        //Azure account key.
        public string accountKey { get; set; }

        public override void ActivateOptions()
        {
            base.ActivateOptions();

            //Logger object.
            if (objLogger == null)
            {
                //Intilize logger object.
                this.objLogger = new Logger(tableName, accountName, accountKey);
            }
        }

        protected override void Append(LoggingEvent loggingEvent)
        {
            try
            {
                //Intilize AzureLog object.
                AzureLog objAzureLog = new AzureLog
                                    {
                                        RoleInstance = "1",
                                        DeploymentId = "100", 
                                        Message = loggingEvent.RenderedMessage,
                                        Level = loggingEvent.Level.Name,
                                    };

                //Insert the log.
                objLogger.Insert(objAzureLog);
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                //Handle exception here.
            }
        }
    }

Step 4.Test the code:

class Program
    {
        //Get the logger object.
        private static readonly ILog logger = LogManager.GetLogger(typeof(Program));

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            try
            {
                logger.Debug("Debug information.");
                logger.Info("Info information.");
                logger.Warn("Warn information.");
                logger.Error("Error information.");
                logger.Fatal("Fatal information.");
                Console.WriteLine("ok");
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(ex.Message);
            }
            Console.ReadKey();
        }
    }

Step 5.My app.config as below:

<configuration>    
  <configSections>
    <section name="log4net"
       type="log4net.Config.Log4NetConfigurationSectionHandler, log4net" />
  </configSections>    
  <startup>
    <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.5" />
  </startup>    
  <log4net>
    <appender name="AzureLogAppender" type="Log4NetAzureTables.AzureLogAppender, Log4NetAzureTables" >
      <param name="tableName" value="your table name" />
      <param name="accountName" value="your account" />
      <param name="accountKey" value="your account key" />
    </appender>    
    <root>
      <level value="ALL" />
      <appender-ref ref="AzureLogAppender" />
    </root>    
  </log4net>      
</configuration>

Step 6.Nav to table, only the specified columns are added: