Any easy way to detect invoking of shortcuts, macros & aliases?

[Sripadvallabh]

I wanted to check the number of times a shortcut or alias or macro was invoked as opposed to the command itself. Is there an easy way to do it?

Currently i feel using a hook & checking the data.statement values:

data.statement.command + data.statement.args != data.statement.raw >>>> MEANS AN INDIRECT COMMAND

But there is no straightforward way to detect if its a macro or shortcut or alias that was invoked.

May i know if this is possible. I just want to have some statistics on how the commands are invoked in general.

[tleonhardt]

Off-hand, I don't think we built in any easy way to detect this as we intend them to be fully equivalent.

We have always been completely agnostic when it comes to how end users choose to do logging and metrics.

[Sripadvallabh]

Ok thank you. Thanks for the support towards aliases & macros. It helps a lot

[kotfu]

I think you are on the right track, but you'll have to write a little bit of code in your hook.

I'd suggest you utilize a precommand hook. The precommand hook will be called by cmd2 after the user input has been parsed (and the aliases expanded), but before the command is executed. In that hook, you'll have to write a bit of code, which will do two things:

1. check the data passed into the hook and determine if the alias.macro has been applied
2. do whatever logging you want

For step 1, you may find the following cmd2 instance variables to be useful:

• self.aliases - contains a dictionary of all aliases and what they expand to
• self.macros - contains a dictionary of all macros and what they expand to

In your hook you can check if data.statement.raw.split(" ")[0] is in self.aliases or self.macros, then log appropriately.

[Sripadvallabh]

Thanks; i was considering to do this