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I have some logging in my application (it happens to be log4cxx but I am flexible on that), and I have some unit tests using the boost unit test framework. When my unit tests run, I get lots of log output, from both the passing and failing tests (not just boost assertions logged, but my own application code's debug logging too). I would like to get the unit test framework to throw away logs during tests that pass, and output logs from tests that fail (I grew to appreciate this behaviour while using python/nose).

Is there some standard way of doing this with the boost unit test framework? If not, are there some start of test/end of test hooks that I could use to buffer my logs and conditionally output them to implement this behaviour myself?

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According to the Boost.Test documentation, run your test executable with --log_level=error. This will catch only failing test cases.

I checked that it works using a BOOST_CHECK(false) on an otherwise correctly running project with a few thousand unit tests.

Running with --log_level=all gives the result of all assertions. I checked that by piping it to wc -l that the number of lines in the log is exactly the same as the number of assertions in the tests (which number is also reported by --report_level=detailed). You could of course also grep the log for the strings error or failed.

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That controls the logs from boost itself, but doesn't help me control the debug logs from the application itself –  kdt Jun 10 '13 at 19:28
    
@kdt then I don't quite follow: what do you mean with "I get lot of log output from the tests"? Where inside your program are you catching them? You could use std::regex on "failed" or "error" for them and drop them as they come buy. –  TemplateRex Jun 10 '13 at 19:53
    
My code does all kinds of debug logging. What I would like to do is have it all buffered up, and then if a test fails, output it, and if it passes, throw it away. When I say "the tests" I don't just mean boost asserts etc, I mean all the code that's running when I run a test. It's OK if the answer is "no, boost unit tests doesn't provide hooks for that" –  kdt Jun 10 '13 at 19:56
    
@kdt I can't easily test it, but did you actually try my suggestion of the runtime parameter? The documentation specifically says: "The active log level works namely as threshold, not as selector. For the given active log level threshold, all test log entries with "importance" higher than threshold are enabled and all test log entries with "importance" below threshold are disabled." So you shouldn't see anything except errors when running with --log_level=error. They won't even be generated. –  TemplateRex Jun 10 '13 at 20:07
    
@kdt I'm still interested to get this to work, can you give me a code example to show where exactly you are catching the errors? –  TemplateRex Jun 13 '13 at 10:56

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