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Today, we're going to start with the comment before the method.
Oct 24 /**
* The topology type of primitives to render. (optional)<br>
* Default: 4<br>
* Valid values: [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
*
* @param mode The mode to set
* @throws IllegalArgumentException If the given value does not meet
* the given constraints
*
*/
Robert was diagnosing a problem in a reporting module. The application code ran a fairly simple query- SELECT field1, field2, field3 FROM report_table- so he foolishly assumed that it would be easy to understand the problem. Of course, the "table" driving the report wasn't actually a table, it was a view in the database.
Most of our readers are familiar with how views work, but for those who have had been corrupted by NoSQL databases: database views are great- take a query you run often, and create it as an object in the database:
"Magic bytes" are a common part of a file header. The first few bytes of a file can often be used to identify what type of file it is. For example, a bitmap file starts with "BM", and a PGM file always starts with "PN" where "N" is a number between 1 and 6, describing the specific variant in use, and WAV files start with "RIFF".
Many files have less human-readable magic bytes, like the ones Christer was working with. His team was working on software to manipulate a variety of different CAD file types. One thing this code needed to do is identify when the loaded file was a CAD file, but not the specific UFF file type they were looking for. In this case, they need to check that the file does not start with 0xabb0, 0xabb1, or 0xabb3. It was trivially easy to write up a validation check to ensure that the files had the correct magic bytes. And yet, there is no task so easy that someone can't fall flat on their face while doing it.
Charles is supporting a PHP based application. One feature of the application is a standard "Contact Us" form. I'll let Charles take on the introduction:
While it looks fine on the outside, the code is a complete mess. The entire site is built with bad practices, redundant variables, poor validation, insecure cookie checks, and zero focus on maintainability or security. Even the core parts of the platform are a nightmare
Once upon a time, web browsers weren't the one-stop-shop for all kinds of possible content that they are today. Aside from the most basic media types, your browser depended on content plugins to display different media types. Yes, there was an era where, if you wanted to watch a video in a web browser, you may need to have QuickTime or… (shudder) Real Player installed.
As a web developer, you'd need to write code to check which plugins were installed. If they don't have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed, there's no point in serving them up a PDF file- you'll need instead to give them an install link.
Sometimes, there's code so bad you simply know it's unused and never called. Bernard sends us one such method, in Java:
/**
* Finds a <code>GroupEntity</code> by group number.
*
* @param group the group number.
* @return the <code>GroupEntity</code> object.
*/
public static GroupEntity find(String group) {
return GroupEntity.find(group);
}
Simon recently found himself working alongside a "very senior" developer- who had a whopping 5 years of experience. This developer was also aggrieved that in recent years, Object Oriented programming had developed a bad reputation. "Functional this, functional that, people really just don't understand how clean and clear objects make your code."
For example, here are a few Java objects which they wrote to power a web scraping tool:
ArSo works at a small company. It's the kind of place that has one software developer, and ArSo isn't it. But ArSo is curious about programming, and has enough of a technical background that small tasks should be achievable. After some conversations with management, an arrangement was made: Kurt, their developer, would identify a few tasks that were suitable for a beginner, and would then take some time to mentor ArSo through completing them.
It sounded great, especially because Kurt was going to provide sample code which would give ArSo a head start on getting things done. What better way to learn than by watching a professional at work?
Alicia recently inherited a whole suite of home-grown enterprise applications. Like a lot of these kinds of systems, it needs to do batch processing. She went tracking down a mysterious IllegalStateException only to find this query causing the problem:
select * from data_import where id > 10000
Some time ago, poor Keith found himself working on an antique Classic ASP codebase. Classic ASP uses VBScript, which is like VisualBasic 6.0, but worse in most ways. That's not to say that VBScript code is automatically bad, but the language certainly doesn't help you write clean code.
In any case, the previous developer needed to make an 8 element array to store some data. Traditionally, in VBScript, you might declare it like so:
Ross needed to write software to integrate with a credit card payment gateway. The one his company chose was relatively small, and only served a handful of countries- but it covered the markets they cared about and the transaction fees were cheap. They used XML for data interchange, and while they had no published schema document, they did have some handy-dandy sample code which let you parse their XML messages.
$response = curl_exec($ch);
$authecode = fetch_data($response, '<authCode>', '</authCode>');
$responsecode = fetch_data($response, '<responsecode>', '</responsecode>');
$retrunamount = fetch_data($response, '<returnamount>', '</returnamount>');
$trxnnumber = fetch_data($response, '<trxnnumber>', '</trxnnumber>');
$trxnstatus = fetch_data($response, '<trxnstatus>', '</trxnstatus>');
$trxnresponsemessage = fetch_data($response, '<trxnresponsemessage>', '</trxnresponsemessage>');
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
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.
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:
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++;
}