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Having been a software consultant for the past two decades or so, John wasn’t too worried when his client asked for some help developing against a “fairly niche” vendor SDK (Software Development Kit) for reading genealogy data from various file formats. When his client mentioned the SDK author had gotten the nickname Dinosaur Bob, John just shrugged his shoulders. He had conquered many a SDK in his day, so how bad could Dinosaur Bob’s SDK be?
The first alarms started going off when John tried to use the SDK’s test program to open a sample project. One of the file formats the SDK supported was called TMG, and that format happened to be developed by the very same Dinosaur Bob. It seemed like the logical place to start, so he loaded up the Dinosaur Bob’s TMG software and created a small sample project called simplest.
On disk, the simplest project was nothing more than a zip file named simplest.zip, and it had a whole lot of files inside, none of which had a .tmg extension. The SDK included a test program (naturally called TEST.EXE) that could be used to open any supported file format, so John simply typed in TEST.EXE simplest.zip and hit enter. The testing program responded with two simple (and mostly correctly-spelled) words: invaild input.
With documentation as terse as the error message, John had little choice but to reach out to Dinosaur Bob himself. From what he could make of Dinosaur Bob's reply, the correct way to open simplest.zip was to create an input file called input.txt containing the following magic instructions:
GbInit 3 50000 GbOpen simplest.zip GbIndiv 1 GbName 1 GbClose
Then, you could run TEST.EXE input.txt output.txt, which would presumably open the file, read the first individual, read what one would assumed to be his first name, and write to output.txt. Of course, when John ran TEST.EXE input.txt output.txt, he got a slightly different error message: Database could not be opened at simplest.ZIP.
“You don’t pass in the zip,” the first half of Dinosaur Bob's response read, “have to unpack it first.”
Hoping for an “aha moment”, John unzipped the file and found the following.
SIMPLEST_$.CDX simplest_b.dbf SIMPLEST_.LST simplest_c.FPT SIMPLEST_A.CDX simplest_d.FPT SIMPLEST_B.CDX simplest_d.dbf SIMPLEST_C.CDX simplest_dna.FPT SIMPLEST_C.DBF simplest_dna.dbf SIMPLEST_D.CDX simplest_e.FPT SIMPLEST_DNA.CDX simplest_e.dbf SIMPLEST_E.CDX simplest_f.FPT SIMPLEST_F.CDX simplest_f.dbf SIMPLEST_G.CDX simplest_g.FPT SIMPLEST_I.CDX simplest_g.dbf SIMPLEST_K.CDX simplest_i.FPT SIMPLEST_L.CDX simplest_i.dbf SIMPLEST_M.CDX simplest_k.dbf SIMPLEST_N.CDX simplest_l.FPT SIMPLEST_ND.CDX simplest_l.dbf SIMPLEST_NPT.CDX simplest_m.FPT SIMPLEST_NPV.CDX simplest_m.dbf SIMPLEST_O.CDX simplest_n.FPT SIMPLEST_P.CDX simplest_n.dbf SIMPLEST_PD.CDX simplest_nd.FPT SIMPLEST_PPT.CDX simplest_nd.dbf SIMPLEST_PPV.CDX simplest_npt.dbf SIMPLEST_R.CDX simplest_npv.dbf SIMPLEST_S.CDX simplest_o.dbf SIMPLEST_ST.CDX simplest_p.FPT SIMPLEST_T.CDX simplest_p.dbf SIMPLEST_U.CDX simplest_pd.FPT SIMPLEST_W.CDX simplest_pd.dbf SIMPLEST_XD.CDX simplest_ppt.dbf born in virginia or tennessee.acc simplest_ppv.dbf end of line ancestors.acc simplest_r.FPT females who are not living.flp simplest_r.dbf living status.acc simplest_s.FPT males and females.acc simplest_s.dbf people who are adopted.flp simplest_st.FPT people whose given name begins with john.flp simplest_st.dbf people with more than six children.flp simplest_t.FPT simplest_$.dbf simplest_t.dbf simplest__.PJC simplest_u.dbf simplest__.log simplest_w.dbf simplest_a.FPT simplest_xd.dbf simplest_a.dbf women whose given name contains liz.flp
Now what? John asked himself, which of these files should I open? He was pretty sure it wasn’t people with more than six children.flp or women whose given name contains liz.flp
After trying a half dozen different file names, John asked Dinosaur Bob exactly what file name he was supposed to pass in. “simplest_” was Dinosaur Bob’s single-word reply. And like that, it worked. It was finally time to try the coding against the API.
In the input.txt file, the magic numbers 3 and 50000 were absolutely critical components of the API. You see, before you can open a file, you have to call a function called GbInit and pass the file format and a buffer size. So GbInit(3,50000) means, you are planning to open a TMG file (file format 3) and will be passing a buffer that’s 50000 to receive the data after opening the file. With this API, you have to plan everything in advance!
In the example we saw GbName 1 to read the first name. You might think GbName 2 and GbName 3 would read the next two name entries, but you’d be wrong. The correct way is:
GbName(1) // Read the first name GbName(0) // Read the next name GbName(0) // Read the next name
Some of the commands worked like that (1 indicated reading the first record from the file, 0 meant read the next), while others were 0-indexed and others were 1-indexed. But a lot depended on the file format you were working with. In TMG, if you wanted to, say, find the total number of individuals, you’d call GbIndiv(0).
Of course, that alone wouldn’t return the total number of individuals, you’d have to loop through each record and check for “empty entries” and “deleted entries”. However, since each file format handled those concepts differently, it seemed the best course of action was to keep calling GbIndiv(#) until you get the error 1 (End of list). Or 2 (Record not found), 3 (Empty Record), or 4 (Deleted Record)
The most surprising thing about the SDK was that John’s first day of working with it was by far the best and most productive. Since there was no ticketing system for filing bugs with Dinosaur Bob, John had to file bugs via email. When he offered to use his own ticketing system, Bob refused saying that, “learning a new system would take away the productivity from actually fixing bugs.”
As he continued using the SDK, John could tell that Dinosaur Bob was really starting to dislike him. Some of his favorite responses included
- “Your application lacks proper philosophy.”
- “You lack sympathy for hard-working SDK developers”
- “You do not know how to use other people’s programs”
- “You are filing too many tickets to keep up”
Eventually, John was banned from emailing Dinosaur Bob directly. A ticket system would have accomplished a similar objective, but Dinosaur Bob instead chose his company’s receptionist.
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