NLog Colored Console - asp.net

Question

I am using NLog to log errors. Here is the Config code
<target name="console" xsi:type="AsyncWrapper" >
<target xsi:type="ColoredConsole" layout="${longdate:padding=-10}${callsite:className=false:includeSourcePath=false:methodName=false} | ${message}" >
<highlight-row condition="level >= LogLevel.Info" foregroundColor="Green" backgroundColor="NoChange"/>
</target>
</target>
I have a custom property set on the log event like
private LogEventInfo GetLogEvent(string loggerName, LogLevel level, string message, ConsoleColor color)
{
var logEvent = new LogEventInfo(level, loggerName, message);
logEvent.Properties["color"] = color;// color= any console color
}
and this sets the "color" property.(lets say "Red" here)
and I am trying to use this "color" property in the target like
<highlight-row condition="equals('${color}','Red')" foregroundColor="Red" backgroundColor="NoChange"/>
this dosent work and I tried
<highlight-row condition="equals('${event-context:item=color}','Red')" foregroundColor="Red" backgroundColor="NoChange"/>
but no luck.
Am I missing something or is there a better way of doing this? Can we use Layout renderers in this case? If yes how do we implement this?

Answer 1

First, since you are storing values in LogEventInfo.Properties, you should be using your second configuration example, which gets the value from event-context.
I have not used the ColoredConsoleTarget, so take this as a suggestion, not as something that I know for a fact will work.
I suspect that the NLog Condition object does not know about the ConsoleOutputColor enum. So, when you store a ConsoleOutputColor enum value in LogEventInfo.Properties, the Condition does not know that 'Red' (in the condition) refers to ConsoleOutputColor.Red. I have two suggestions:
First option: store the string value of the ConsoleOutputColor in LogEventInfo.Properties. Using ToColor might be sufficient. Something like this:
var logEvent = new LogEventInfo(level, loggerName, message);
logEvent.Properties["color"] = color.ToString();
Then, in your Condition, you should be able to compare against the ConsoleOutputColor string values (what you have in your configuration might be right, if you store the color name string as I suggested).
If that doesn't work, you could try...
Second option: store the ConsoleOutputColor value in LogEventInfo.Properties, as you are doing now, but change your condition in the config file to compare the "color" from event-context to the numeric value of the ConsoleOutputColor values. Something like this (I have not tried this so I don't know for sure that it is correct):
<highlight-row condition="equals('${event-context:item=color}','12')" foregroundColor="Red" backgroundColor="NoChange"/>
(In the ConsoleOutputColor enum, Red is 12).