Console formatting for duration

[mitar]

Console output is meant to be human-readable, but durations are shown as floats (e.g., in seconds or milliseconds) which is far from human-readable for non-simple durations. I know that the issue is that console output is interpreting data in JSON, and in JSON the fact that a field was a duration is lost, is just a number, but I still think some solution to this should be provided.

One way would be to use FormatFieldValue but sadly it does not get field name as a parameter, so one cannot hard-code it to (known/used) duration field names to convert float to formatted duration string.

Maybe DurationFields could get a list of duration field names?

Currently, it looks that the only workaround is to use FormatPrepare which can do some preprocessing based on (known/used) field names.

Any other suggestion how to tackle this?

[mitar]

It seems there is now also FormatPartValueByName to allow formatting per field name, but this is still tricky as you have to maintain what are names of duration fields.

[sruehl]

EDIT: bit nonsense I wrote (Original below)

So the simplest solution would be to add a Global DurationFieldFormat, deprecate DurationFieldInteger and have the DurationFieldFormat by default on float. Then DurationFieldFormat could be: "float", "integer", "string" (best define a enum for that?).

WDYT @rs?

I could prepare a PR for that.

Original nonsense:

~I have the same problem. It basically applies for time.Time and time.Duration. The way zerolog works is that is calls json.AppendDuration in Dur and Time etc.~

// Dur adds the field key with duration d stored as zerolog.DurationFieldUnit.
// If zerolog.DurationFieldInteger is true, durations are rendered as integer
// instead of float.
func (e *Event) Dur(key string, d time.Duration) *Event {
	if e == nil {
		return e
	}
	e.buf = enc.AppendDuration(enc.AppendKey(e.buf, key), d, DurationFieldUnit, DurationFieldInteger, FloatingPointPrecision)
	return e
}

~so the only way I see atm is to add a feature request for a global TimeMarshalFunc and DurMarshalFunc similar to InterfaceMarshalFunc.~

[rs]

sgtm

[sruehl]

#733 should solve this by setting DurationFieldFormat to DurationFormatString