Forums
Today's anonymous submitter sends us some C# code. This particular block of code controls whether two different columns are visible on the screen. If the field Dist_Por equals one set of constants, we display one column, if it equals a different constant, we display the other. Seems simple enough.
My question to you is this: how many nested ternaries do you need to solve this problem?
I recognize that our comments system here leaves much to be desired, especially with regards to the spam filter. Lots of good comments get moderated, an annoying quantity of spam gets through. But today, I want to take a moment to talk about some of the spam we get. Because we get a lot. And since most of you never see it as most of it hits our moderation queue, I don't think you can appreciate how weird some of the spam we get is. Formatting preserved, but links- where they were present- stripped.
We'll start with one of my "favorites", the sycophant:
Today we return to Jessica (previously), who still suffers under Windows Forms. But it's not all Windows Forms. There's also random CLI tools kicking around. CLI tools which should really be designed to run as a service,
Let's start with the Main method of this particular tool.
Grace sends us, in her words, "the function that validates the data from the signup form for a cursed application."
It's more than one function, but there are certainly some clearly cursed aspects of the whole thing.
Grace was tracking down some production failures, which put her on the path to inspecting a lot of URLs in requests. And that put her onto this blob of code:
app.get(
(
[
"/api/ddm/getProjectList",
":dueDate",
":status",
":userAssignedId",
":managerID",
":clientID",
":projectHeaderID",
":tagId",
":companyId",
":clientGroup",
":isDefault",
":dateRange",
":dateToFilter",
":tagIds",
":statusIds",
":repeatValues",
":engagementID?",
":completionDate?"
]
.join( "/" )
),
ddmDboardCtrl.getProjectList
);
Last week's out of order logging reminded Adam R of a similar bug he encountered once.
The log files looked like this:
Matthias sends us what he calls the "tern of the century". Which, before I share it with you: bad news, it's just a regular bad ternary. But it remains bad in interesting ways, so it's definitely worth talking about. But let's not oversell it.
private static String getOrderTypeCode(CreateOrderRequest order) {
return !StringUtils.isBlank(order.getOrderParams().getReceivingCompanyFoo()) && ORDR_TP_DQQ_FOO.equals(order.getOrderParams().getOrderType()) ? ORDR_TP_DQQ_BAR_CDE : order.GetOrderParams().getOrderType().getOrderTypeCode();
}
Philipp H was going through some log files generated by their CI job to try and measure how long certain steps in the process took. He took the obvious path of writing code to read the logfiles, parse out the timestamps, and then take the difference between them.
Everything worked fine, until for certain steps, a negative timestamp was reported: