eDOCS DM Server Log Parser - Part 2: Implementation

This is the second post about parsing Hummingbird DM / OpenText eDOCS DM server logs. Part #1 is here.

In this part I'm going to briefly explain the structure of the log parser just in case anyone may want to recompile, modify or extend it. However, if you simply want to get the DM Log Parser executable and use it, please feel free to jump directly to Part #3 - Usage of this article series.

The EDocsLogParser solution is implemented in C# / Visual Studio 2013 and consists of 3 projects.

EDocsLog is a Class Library and this is the core of the parser. The LogFile class represents a log file as a string array. The LogParser class is responsible for converting the log file into an array of events. It applies a set of predefined rules to the log lines. Rules are based on regular expressions. The rules return a RuleResult object, which tells the parser how to recognize event blocks (chunks) and to convert them into events. The result of the LogParser execution is an array of events. The events are serializable to XML via System.Xml.Serialization.
The parser performs two runs on a DM Server "raw" log file. On the first run, it applies the header and footer rules (see Part 1 for details about event blocks) and forms event stubs or chunks. The second run applies the inner or "body" rules to extract additional data from the recognized event block. The second run only processes the log lines within the previously found chunks. It also benefits from Task Parallel Library (TPL) for faster processing of the array of chunks.



EDocsLogParser is a WPF application. It allows you to pick a directory with DM Server logs and then to convert all of them into XML files. It calls the LogParser.Parse method for every log file and displays the progress.


EDocsLogTests is a set of unit tests for the EDocsLog classes.

Currently, the log parser can extract SQL events from a DM Server log file. It works for any log file, but, apparently, events will be extracted only if the log file was created with Log SQL, Log SQL & Calls, or Log All logging level:

Full source code of EDocsLogParser: https://github.com/dotnetnick/edocs/