What Have I Done to Production?
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Got a ticket today that some salespeople are putting a truncated 15 character contact ID into our email history tracker instead of the 18 character ID and expecting their email history views to work.
Now thankfully it's SalesForce so those last three characters are just a checksum of the ID, but still.
Now rather than slap the salespeople on the wrist and tell them to do it right, ir fix the input system to look up the checksum and add it i'm told to just fix the view...
CREATE VIEW [DATABASE].[views].[EmailHistory] AS -- There's a lot more colums selected and a few more joins, but here's the relevant part SELECT ER.[RowID] ,COALESCE(C.Id, ER.[MaybeTruncatedTo15CharContactId]) FROM [DATABASE].[dbo].[EmailRecipient] ER LEFT JOIN [DATABASE].[synonyms].[CONTACT] C ON LEN(ER.MaybeTruncatedTo15CharContactId) = 15 AND LEFT(C.Id,15) = ER.MaybeTruncatedTo15CharContactId GO
Well that will fix the view, but at what cost? What has
science@accalia wrought?
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Do what you think you need to do. But, yes. Slap their wrists and validate the input field to accept only 18 characters. Otherwise you are creating a processing overhead (and bad User practise) that can only get worse
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Slap their wrists and validate the input field to accept only 18 characters.
if i could..... if i could....
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Oh but you can if you can't do it nicely at the UI end of the process, then do it at the back end before you have invested too much cost. Throw a "nice" well caught, well handled Exception and blame its requirement on DB constraints, neatness or symmetry. It's not as if they have a real clue what you are talking about, is it?
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18 digits is far too long to expect anybody to enter.
Why not change it to like 6 alpha-numeric digits. That should be sufficient unless you have millions of sales contacts.
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I was directly told by my boss to just make it work and not change the users workflow in any way...
so no i don't have much choice.
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That's what the Nazis said!
Ok I'll show myself out.
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Why not change it to like 6 alpha-numeric digits. That should be sufficient unless you have millions of sales contacts.
because Salesforce uses 18 character IDs.
and they cut and paste the id anyway.
and because the architecture predates me because if i had done it it would fucking well not involve any manual user intervention at all.
i'm already sick and tired of the "you lost my email record" tickets that after investivgation turn out to be because they never entered it into the tracking system in the first place.
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I can see that I am going to have to teach you about "under the keyboard" (just made up /adapted that phrase) deliverables.
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i know about those..... ;-)
they're not an option today but tomorrow.... tomorrow will see a revisit
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Besides, them typing the wrong data in is them stepping out of the work flow, so....
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but they've always done it that way and it's always worked before!
or so they claim
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Have you fixed something else that may have been a work-round for this, making this now look broken again? because I know that cuthtaluluwhatistthingy
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Is there a connection between this topic and a very recent Article?
Just askin', is all.
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Have you fixed something else Tha may have a work-round for this, making this now look broken again?
nope. it's been broken like this for bout three months now (since we went to salesforce) and given the data in the table it's been broken for years on the old system.
the salewspeople just don't think and blame IT for everything and.... well politics is involved at this point.
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and they cut and paste the id anyway.
Apparently they don't or they'd get the checksum too.
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Apparently they don't or they'd get the checksum too.
The table they're using for reporting probably only has a 15 character wide field. The check digits will be hidden under the next field…
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Apparently they don't or they'd get the checksum too.
for rasins the URL in salesforce (where they like to cut and paste from apparently) does not include the checksum.....
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Time to annoy salesforce so they fix that b.... HAHAHA
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i see you couldn't keep a straight face either
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I haven't even worked with SalesForce.
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the salewspeople just don't think and blame IT for everything
the salespeople do think. but they generally see IT as a place to put the blame for their errors. so, as long as they can get away with "it's a software problem" they'll keep doing it
well politics is involved at this point.
It's always politics. always
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Given what we already know, I doubt they have that many contacts. Maybe one or two numeric digits will be sufficient.
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but they've always done it that way and it's always worked before!
One of my colleagues in another
lifejob was in charge of writing reports such as the 'management report'. This included 'booked' and 'forecast' figures, which were entirely different numbers, but essentially it was up to the client to enter the booked figures in a way that was close to the forecast.One day the client claimed the report my colleague wrote was 'always wrong' because the booked figures didn't match the forecast figures.
My colleague practically yelled at them (rightfully so, in my opinion).
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"it's a software problem"
But it is a software problem: it's related to the soft spot in their heads.
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One day the client claimed the report my colleague wrote was 'always wrong' because the booked figures didn't match the forecast figures.
Oh, that sort of insanity. It's a but it's an accounting one, not an IT one.
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Oh, that sort of insanity. It's a but it's an accounting one, not an IT one.
This is true, but the fact that IT had to do anything about it seems like an additional .
You are right though. Basically it was a training issue, and furthermore this was something the ers in question had been trained in already.
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This is true, but the fact that IT had to do anything about it seems like an additional .
Not really. If you wrote everything out in copperplate handwriting in leather-bound ledgers, with absolutely no computing devices involved at all, you'd still be able to get the identical problem. A prediction is just a prediction, and anyone losing sight of that needs to GTFO…