Convenient logging with protractor - selenium

Question

I'm trying to make logging easier for devs writing selenium tests with protractor.
I'm looking at selenium-webdriver/lib/logging and am trying to figure out how to make a convenient logging system.
Here is an example spec:
it('should NOT show welcome before login', () => {
// convenient log here
expect(homepage.logo.isPresent()).toBe(true);
// log message that would occur after expect
expect(homepage.welcomeText.isPresent()).toBe(false);
// final log message
});
I'm not quite sure how to go about this.
I'm trying to avoid having to do (below) for every log message.
homepage.welcomeText.isPresent().then(() => console.log('foo bar'));

Answer 1

There is a npm package - log4js-protractor-appender which will solve your problem.It is built specially for Protractor based environments and it places all logger command in Protractor Control flow and resolves Protractor promises before logging.
Since Protractor executes all commands in a Control Flow , and all non protractor commands dont get executed in the order we like. So regular logging will need an extra effort from us to chain a non-protractor command to a protractor command
Example:
browser.getCurrentUrl().then(function _logValue(url){
logger.info("The url is" + url);
});
But log4js-protractor-appender enabled to write something like this directly - browser.logger.info('Displayed text is:', browser.getCurrentUrl());
For more details on how to implement this- Please check my blog post - How to implements logs for Protractor/JavaScript based Test Automation Frameworks

Answer 2

For expects you can use toBeTruthy or Falsy and include message there. It would log if something goes wrong. Page Object pattern says you must not have weddriver methods in spec files meaning you may cretae method which would verify something present or not and then() log there like in your example. Also you can implement asyncLog function. console.log() method goes to Stack and executes before protractor methods since protractor's Control Flow or Managed Promise. It wraps every protractor method in deffered promise which puts it in callback queue which executes only after stack is empty. Take a look at next code. I didn't try it out for Protractor though but you can get the idea.
var promise = Promise.resolve();
function asyncLog(message) {
Promise.resolve().then(() => console.log(message));
}
console.log('Start');
promise
.then(() => console.log('This is then'))
asyncLog('This is Callback Queue log');
console.log('This is Call Stack log');
promise
.then(() => console.log('This is another then'))