The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

One More Parameter, Bro

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2024-11-07

Matt needed to add a new field to a form. This simple task was made complicated by the method used to save changes back to the database. Let's see if you can spot what the challenge was:

public int saveQualif(String docClass, String transcomId, String cptyCod, String tradeId, String originalDealId, String codeEvent, String multiDeal,
            String foNumber, String codeInstrfamily, String terminationDate, String premiumAmount, String premiumCurrency, String notionalAmount,
            String codeCurrency, String notionalAmount2, String codeCurrency2, String fixedRate, String payout, String maType, String maDate,
            String isdaZoneCode, String tradeDate, String externalReference, String entityCode, String investigationFileReference,
            String investigationFileStartDate, String productType, String effectiveDate, String expiryDate, String paymentDate, String settInstrucTyp,
            String opDirection, String pdfPassword, String extlSysCod, String extlDeaId, String agrDt) throws TechnicalException, DfException

24 comments - Last comment @ 2024-11-08

Uniquely Validated

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-11-06

There's the potential for endless installments of "programmers not understanding how UUIDs work." Frankly, I think the fact that we represent them as human readable strings is part of the problem; sure, it's readable, but conceals the fact that it's just a large integer.

Which brings us to this snippet, from Capybara James.

9 comments - Last comment @ 2024-11-08

Counting it All

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-11-05

Since it's election day in the US, many people are thinking about counting today. We frequently discuss counting here, and how to do it wrong, so let's look at some code from RK.

This code may not be counting votes, but whatever it's counting, we're not going to enjoy it:

22 comments - Last comment @ 05:06

A Matter of Understanding

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-11-04

For years, Victoria had a co-worker who "programmed by Google Search"; they didn't understand how anything worked, they simply plugged their problem into Google search and then copy/pasted and edited until they got code that worked. For this developer, I'm sure ChatGPT has been a godsend, but this code predates its wide use. It's pure "Googlesauce".

    StringBuffer stringBuffer = new StringBuffer();
    stringBuffer.append("SELECT * FROM TABLE1 WHERE COLUMN1 = 1 WITH UR");

    String sqlStr = stringBuffer.toString();
    ps = getConnection().prepareStatement(sqlStr);

    ps.setInt(1, code);

    rs = ps.executeQuery();

    while (rs.next())
    {
      count++;
    }

30 comments - Last comment @ 2024-11-05