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Admin
Good thing that they have only one chart per page.
EDIT: oh and SCEOND
Admin
nah. That's a FRIST.
Paula doesn't count. :-D
Admin
*cough* http://what.thedailywtf.com/t/wrongness/7743/5 5th.
Admin
Oh yeah, it should be TIHRD.
Opps, I think my PHP script broke.
Admin
yeah, but as i said Paula Bean doesn't count (same as all the other bots we have running around here)
Admin
So now we have a WTF squared. The IT company for not fixing the problem This company for creating a WFT hack to fix it.
So the next guy/gal can post this "solution" as the WTF to TDWTF.
Admin
It's the great circle of WTF.
[image]Admin
Did I miss a "To be continued..."?
Admin
"You're right Liss, why do we keep paying them.." This is the part I was worried about too. Why pay people who don't do the job?
". Okay, guess we're going to fix it ourselves. Did they tell you which file that was?" And here we have the reason the business keeps having the issue... IT keeps fixing sh-t that isn't their responsibility. From the business perspective, the software keeps getting workarounds/fixes, So no need to pressure the provider. Either a weak IT leader, or a business that doesn't respect IT (often the same thing)...
Admin
@Maciejasjmj, well dramatized. :clap: Take a bow.
Admin
Didn't the part where they spent most of the day playing CS didn't ring any bell?
Admin
Oh come on, that was clearly a team building exercise.
Admin
Why not? After all, you're (I assume) paying them for support too. In this particular case, they were able to devise a workaround, next time it might turn out to be impossible. Besides, it's an unsupported kludge that might stop working any minute now.
Hacking workarounds should be a "when everything else fails" solution. In this case, everything else failed.
Admin
You want a Hanzo saga? Because that's how you get a Hanzo saga.
Admin
Lyle is better at lasertag than you!
Admin
This reminds me of when I fixed bugs in a vendor's REST library by implementing a proxy and modifying data in-flight so it wouldn't crash the client API written by the same vendor, who also happened to have like 95% marketshare and was generally not interested in fixing bugs or improving their software.
Admin
Until Bert kicks him off his mommy and daddy's modem.
Admin
Because the bastard always plays terrorist and buys the fracking Krieg!
Filed under: Yeah, I haven't played CS in ages
Admin
Or maybe Steve was actually looking at a Perl script?
Admin
No, just that at the end it seemed it would continue with the "Revenge of the IT nerds" or something.
Admin
So what's the point to have the script download all the images if it only uses the first one?
So many WTFs...
Admin
To leave the system in a known state?
Admin
FTF... No, hold on, those are equivalent in this case. Carry on.
Admin
Exactly. The user was supposed to see one picture, and the idea was to make that visible. The script butts in, downloads the image as well as all next images / pages, then sends the first one to the user and discards the rest. Now what happens when the user wants to see the next page?
Admin
They simply request a refresh of the report, download the previous n pages of images of the report, then display the next image. For each page. Every time.
Admin
Nothing, because the whole thing happens on export and not while viewing the report. The script goes through the whole report, picking out images, so there's no "going to the next page" to speak of.
As to why it scrapes all images - I'll check the submission later, because I remember it made sense to me. I think it was related to having no stop condition other than the two error images in a row.
Admin
That's also how we got Mandatory Fun Day.
Admin
The report had more than one chart. Each chart was an <img> with the exact same URL, which served the charts in order and only once. When all the charts had been loaded, the URL just served up an error page.
So when you preview the report it looks fine, but the next time you view it (after exporting the HTML) the charts are all broken images. The fix was to create a new session and generate that same report, save all the chart images and export the HTML, and then inject the images back into the HTML as static images instead of that stupid dynamic link. Then give that to the user.
Admin
Silly me, when they said they were going to look at the source code, I figured that meant they were going to actually fix the bug.
Admin
You are assuming that they have access to the server side code. I have two words for you: Crystal Reports.
Admin
Also,
actually I was wrong, I don't think there's a good explanation.
Admin
That seems contradictory.
Admin
Not quite. That's where the almost part is. Their I.T.s are great beast tamers.
Admin
It was plausible to me that 1.img was the first image on each page, 2.img was the second. Works fine until you get up to NaN images per page -- or some idiot glommed all of the pages into one entity like a report (or infini-scroll).
Perhaps because the company didn't have the programmer bandwidth to re-engineer every piece of crap code they relied upon. Who cares if a few kids have a problem working with it? The customer's problem got solved, and the kids learned some valuable anti-patterns to use if they become highly-paid consultants (or to avoid if they get a real job).
Admin
Not at all. Please allow me to put it into terms you can understand:
Admin
What does this article have to do with being butthurt?
Admin
I wouldn't know.
Admin
You must be new here.
Admin