ActivityExtensions.SetStatus vs Activity.Status

[jamescrosswell]

The docs for ActivityExtensions.SetStatus indicate:

Activity class in .NET does not support 'Status'.

And the implementation for that extension method just sets a couple of otel tags on the activity:

        activity.SetTag(SpanAttributeConstants.StatusCodeKey, StatusHelper.GetTagValueForStatusCode(status.StatusCode));
        activity.SetTag(SpanAttributeConstants.StatusDescriptionKey, status.Description);

There is an Activity.Status property in .NET 7.

This is a bit confusing. The Activity.Status of the span/activity that you get from the following code is ActivityStatusCode.Unset... not what you'd expect:

        using var activity = MyActivitySource.StartActivity("Funny business");
        try
        {
            throw new Exception("test activity.RecordException");
        }
        catch (Exception e)
        {
            activity?.RecordException(e);
            activity?.SetStatus(Status.Error.WithDescription(e.Message));
        }

Is this because the Activity class on older versions of the .NET Framework didn't have a Status field?

I wonder if it makes sense to augment the implementation of ActivityExtensions.SetStatus with something like:

        public static void SetStatus(this Activity activity, Status status)
        {
            Debug.Assert(activity != null, "Activity should not be null");

#if NET7_0_OR_GREATER
            // Set Activity.Status directly on target frameworks that support this
            activity.SetStatus(status.ToActivityStatusCode(), status.message); 
#endif
            activity.SetTag(SpanAttributeConstants.StatusCodeKey, StatusHelper.GetTagValueForStatusCode(status.StatusCode));
            activity.SetTag(SpanAttributeConstants.StatusDescriptionKey, status.Description);
        }

ToActivityStatusCode could probably be avoided by writing an implicit conversion operator for OpenTelemetry.Trace.Status.

[vishweshbankwar]

@jamescrosswell If you are using the latest stable version of SDK, you can simply call activity.SetStatus(ActivityStatusCode) to set the status on activity (No need for conditional compilation). Note that this API is available in library System.Diagnostics.DiagnosticSource starting version 6.0 reference, it does not directly depend on the targetframework of your app. Using ActivityExtensions.SetStatus is not recommended, we do have a gap on documentation and will get this fixed. Thanks for the feedback.

[jamescrosswell]

Thanks @vishweshbankwar... that makes sense. Maybe worth adding an [Obsolete] attribute to the ActivityExtensions.SetStatus extension method in OpenTelemetry?