Logging to a file on Android

Question

Is there any way of retrieving log messages from an Android handset.

I'm building an application which uses the GPS of my HTC Hero. I can run and debug the application from eclipse but this isn't a good use case of GPS, sat at my desk.

When I fire the app up when I am walking around, I get an intermittent exception. Is there anyway I can output these exceptions to a text file on the SD card or output calls to Log.x("") to a text file so that I can see what the exception is.

Thanks

EDIT : Solution

Here is the code I finally went with...

Thread.currentThread().setUncaughtExceptionHandler(new Thread.UncaughtExceptionHandler() {
    @Override
    public void uncaughtException(Thread thread, Throwable ex) {

    PrintWriter pw;
    try {
        pw = new PrintWriter(
                new FileWriter(Environment.getExternalStorageDirectory()+"/rt.log", true));
        ex.printStackTrace(pw);
        pw.flush();
        pw.close();
    } catch (IOException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
}
});

I had to wrap the line

pw = new PrintWriter(new FileWriter(Environment.getExternalStorageDirectory()+"/rt.log", true));

in a try/catch as Eclipse would not let me compile the app. It kept saying

Unhandled exception type IOException

1 quick fix
    Sorround with try/catch

So I did and it all works which is fine by me but it does make me wonder what Eclipse was on about...

Answer 1

You could use Thread.setUncaughtExceptionHandler() to catch the Exceptions.

Writing to SD Card is as simple as retrieving the directory for the card using Environment.getExternalStorageDirectory() and creating a file there.

File f = new File(Environment.getExternalStorageDirectory(),filename);

You will need to give you app the correct permission to write to the SD Card by adding this to your Manifest:

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE" />

Answer 2

You could take a look at microlog4android. They have a solution ready to log to a file.

http://code.google.com/p/microlog4android/