I am sure that I missed a holiday here in Canada today. Well at least in Ontario. There is no rhyme or reason unless there is one and I would suppose this holiday would be ‘Park like a Moron’ day. Heading off to work this morning and stopping by a local Tim Horton’s my cat like senses continued to call out total acts of Douchery. Taking 2 parking lanes, backing well into the drive thru, Parking on the lines and other acts of stupidity. I this morning reflect where the skills of common courtesy have gone and why there seems to be a level of entitlement and ignorance out there that is rampant and disheartening. All this lack of consideration broke the smooth flow of service, making the simple process of picking up a coffee unpalatable.
Anything that gets in the way of a smooth process has a negative impact on its users. The more pain the less a user will want to use the system until they get to the point to dismiss it completely. I had come up with a situation where a customer was having problems with stability. The users were faced with constant logging out of the site and my responsibility was to identify and cure the system from the issues. I set up an environment here at our office that contained their DB and the VFS and was able to replicate their issue. After some time I broke down issues to some of the customizations that were written, not that they were written bad but that they did not go far enough to guard the potential of bad data. Data is a great thing as it allows us to run our businesses and make important decisions, however bad data can take us the the worst place very fast.
So I have written a lot of text to say one thing ..
Test any results from method to ensure that a valid value comes back.
Do not do
IAccount account = EntityFactory.GetById<IAccount>(accountId);
return account.AccountName;
Do
string accountName = string.empty;
IAccount account = EntityFactory.GetById<IAccount>(accountId);
if (account != null) accountName = account.AccountName;
return accountName;
And always, .. always test for null.
Mark
Mark – as our friends across the pond say – Spot On. “Bad Data” has caused my clients more issues than I’d care to say.
Having records with foreign keys that are not “null” (either blank or pointing to an invalid/non-existing record) raises tons of havoc. Non-strings (ints/floats/currency, etc) that are “empty” can be a big pita as well. Always good to set them to “zero”.