Add ability to customise format of messages or columns in Events

[HaydenReeve]

Story

Currently, it's quite difficult to understand the context of messages in the Events window within certain circumstances.

Specifically, circumstances involving columns with complex datatypes, such as DateTimes.

For us, we need to expose a certain "virtual time" always, because we're a digital twin product. We use Expressions for other sinks to simply pin it in front of the message in most cases, but Seq does not accept templates. This leads to the necessity of requiring Columns to expose our properties.

Solution

Being able to customise the cultures of certain columns, like DateTime, to be more human-readable would be exceptionally nice and make certain messages much easier to read.

Alternative / Bonus

Alternatively, being able to parse each message into a Template, similar to Serilog.Expressions would also be suitable, because you could opt to only use columns where it makes sense to do so, rather than on every bit of metadata you want to expose.

Rather than doing this expressions-configuration on the sink definition, you could do it Seq Server-Side, which opens up the same level of flexibility that columns currently promise.

[KodrAus]

Thanks for the suggestion @HaydenReeve! :+1: It definitely would be nice to be able to use expressions as columns.