I’ll give an example. At my previous company there was a program where you basically select a start date, select an end date, select the system and press a button and it reaches out to a database and pulls all the data following that matches those parameters. The horrors of this were 1. The queries were hard coded.

  1. They were stored in a configuration file, in xml format.

  2. The queries were not 1 entry. It was 4, a start, the part between start date and end date, the part between end date and system and then the end part. All of these were then concatenated in the program intermixed with variables.

  3. This was then sent to the server as pure sql, no orm.

  4. Here’s my favorite part. You obviously don’t want anyone modifying the configuration file so they encrypted it. Now I know what you’re thinking at some point you probably will need to modify or add to the configuration so you store an unencrypted version in a secure location. Nope! The program had the ability to encrypt and decrypt but there were no visible buttons to access those functions. The program was written in winforms. You had to open the program in visual studio, manually expand the size of the window(locked size in regular use) and that shows the buttons. Now run the program in debug. Press the decrypt button. DO NOT EXIT THE PROGRAM! Edit the file in a text editor. Save file. Press the encrypt button. Copy the encrypted file to any other location on your computer. Close the program. Manually email the encrypted file to anybody using the file.

  • Mr. Satan@lemmy.zip
    6·
    4 hours ago

    So this is not as bad as some of the other stories I’ve seen, but I’ll bite.

    It was an old .NET Framework MVC app. Some internal product management system or something. There was a need to do a PDF export in one of the use cases, so someone implemented it. It wasn’t a good implementation: one big controller, mixing UI and business logic, etc. However, it basically came down to a single private method in a specific controller for a page.

    Now time passes and lo and behold, we need a PDF export in another page for a different use case. “No problem,” - same dev, probably - “I already solved this problem. I’ll just reuse the PFD generation logic.”
    Now, any sane person would probably try to refactor the code responsible for PDF stuff into a separate service (class) and reuse it. A less sane, but somewhat, acceptable approach would have been to just copy paste the thing into another controller and call it a day.

    Ha! No no no no no no… Copy pasting is bad, code should be reused…

    The end solution: REFLECTION. So the dev decided that the easiest way to make it work was to: 1) use reflection to inject one controller into another; 2) then use reflection again to get access and call that private method for PDF rendering into a stream.

    Fortunately I didn’t have to fix that fragile mess. But I did my fair share of DevExpress corpse hacking and horrible angular “server side rendering” workarounds.