Skip to main content

Doh! - figure out return values before coding for them

Many developers will tell you "Development is full of "aha" moments" - those moments when something clicks and everything falls into place. What they don't tell you is that there are also a few "doh" moments - moments where you see code (usually your old code from years back) and instantly see why it wasn't doing what it should have been doing in the first place.

So here's a recent "doh" moment in VFP.

I'm tracking some strange behavior issues in some CursorAdapter code and figure I can use the AfterRecordRefresh event to see if I did get a refresh or not.

I have a lot of my code wrapped in a TRY CATCH LOOP but I had a little piece of code outside of it that I wanted to trap why a record was not refreshed.

The AfterRecordRefresh event gets three parameters:
nRecords - The number of records to refresh (passed to the recordrefresh method)
nRecordOffset - The record offset passed
nRefreshed - the return value from the RecordRefresh method

So the code was...

IF nRefreshed = 0
    ** Log this so we can see why no records were refreshed
ENDIF

Anyone catch the "doh"?

(for one, the documentation is this case is incredibly convoluted to follow. The AfterRecordRefresh method gives you some basic description but essentially says "See RecordRefresh" - once a doc goes into "see this" mode, it can often get overlooked.)

If you refreshed one record, nRefreshed would be 1, right?
If it didn't succeed, it would be .....

The "doh" is that RecordRefresh returns zero if there were no records were refreshed and there were no errors. If there were errors, it returns -1. Now, that's what I wanted to track down with.

So the code was recording any time an update was done, even when there were no changes.

Who reads the docs anyways, right? RTFM!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Who Wants To Be Logical? I Do! I Don't! (with Claude)

In my book, Towards Consciousness, I explore PET , a theory that attempts to explain consciousness and possibly how it might apply to AI. As part of the conversations with AI series, I've included this conversation with Claude.AI in which we were talking about something very different and yet the conversation redirected itself back to PET. For the record, there is no such thing as "Colfsity". A It's interesting to me that people want to proclaim their distinction from being rigid and unlike machines, yet they also complain that the "best" people keep a rigid schedule, regular routines and logic understanding of issues. That's a perceptive observation about a real tension in how people think about themselves and what they value. There does seem to be this paradox where rigidity is simultaneously rejected as "robotic" or inhuman, yet praised when it appears as discipline, consistency, or logical thinking. I think part of what's happening is t...

Merry Christmas

Whether you celebrate now, have already celebrated your past holiday, are planning to, or not, I hope you find yourself surrounded by family and those you love during this holiday season and are able to remember fondly those who are not with you. We often find ourselves buried in work, or too distracted by other problems, to share and remember a few moments with those closest to us. So many of us are separated by huge distances, we often find it easier to focus on those who are out of arm's reach yet so easy to connect with online, instead of those who are right beside us. So do yourself a favour, put down the keyboard (stylus, mouse, etc) and spend that time. I know I will. Merry Christmas. Powered by ScribeFire .

Comparing education systems based on their technology

(yes, I originally found this blog because of Scoble's note on it BUT it was kind of interesting all the same) Read Alex Mallet's summary of his first week at MIT. Malletrivia: Summary of the first complete week Wow - "There's an incredible amount of material packed into each lecture" - and it sounds interesting... Compared to some of the lecture content I have seen at our universities, you really must get what you pay for. While it sounds like Alex is writing frantically down notes in his classes, at least he's finding something worth writing about in them. Case in point: one of our local universities ( Carleton ) puts some lecture classes on the TV (like many universities do) - but you would think they purposely find the most boring professors to teach them. They put up PowerPoint slides with 30 points on them, speak in monotone voice (yes, imagine the typical caricature of the university lecture from years ago), tell the students to print their...