Effortless network response logging on Android

While developing an Android app that gets data from a remote server, you often need to see what data you’re actually receiving. I explain what options you have to inspect network responses when using Retrofit and OkHttp, two of the most popular networking libraries for Android.

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1. Effortless network response logging on Android Simon Perčič, senior Android developer Thursday, April 21st, 2016 @ 17:00
2. http://square.github.io/okhttp/ Networking on Android http://square.github.io/retrofit/
3. Retrofit 1
4. Retrofit 2
5. Retrofit 2 Logging: Retrofit → OkHttp’s interceptors
6. Retrofit 2
7. How does the log output look like? JSON formatter / JSON viewer
8. OkLog https://github.com/simonpercic/OkLog
9. OkLog
10. OkLog Share url with coworkers. (Usually REST API developers) “OkLog is like git blame, but for network requests”
11. How does it work? Response string from OkHttp via application-level interceptor gzip Base64 encode Create url and write string to log (w/ Timber if present) OkLog Get string from url param Base64 decode un-gzip Return string to browser, pretty-print if JSON ResponseEcho
12. Ok, how do I use it? 1. 2. 3.
13. Known limitations - Android’s logging system: limited line length ~4k chars - on some very long responses, 4k chars is not enough, even if gzipped - if using Timber, url is split into multiple lines ...everything works fine for the majority of cases
14. Non-logging approaches Facebook’s Stetho http://facebook.github.io/stetho/
15. Non-logging approaches Charles Proxy https://www.charlesproxy.com
16. Which one should you use? - No silver bullet that would cover all cases - Use side-by-side, depending on the use case you want to cover
17. Logging in production “every time you log in production, a puppy dies.” - Jake Wharton, Timber readme (https://github.com/JakeWharton/timber) http://developer.android.com/tools/publishing/preparing.html#publishing-configure
18. Questions? @simonpercic @simonpercic simonpercic