Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Hard to be this productive......

.....today at work I had what we in IT call a non-expected outcome to a solution provided or aka "a screw up". I was working today on an agent(small little program) that would send out a weekly reminder to our building about our accounting reports being updated. This agent was to run once a week and should send out less than 100 emails. A nice, easy programming project....or so I thought. I wrote my agent, changed the program from one that ran against an event(ie a mouse click) to a schedule. There is one final setting to change before creating a simply mail agent and that is to tell it what data source it should run this agent against. YOu have 3 options:1)All documents in the database, 2) All new and modified documents in the database, 3) None. Since I didn't need this agent to run against anything I set it to none.....or so I thought. Apparently when I was starting the programming I missed a small little detail which is when you change the type agent from a script agent to a simple agent the "none" option disappears and the All documents option becomes active. I missed this critical piece of information! So when I saved my new agent that I was so proud of I was greeted about 5 minutes later with my blackberry vibrating and it wasn't stopping. Then I noticed it was still counting up and all the messages coming from my agent that I was so proud of. So as I am working try to figure out what happened I was helped by Troy and Michael to discover that critical change. So what happened was a reminder email was send to every person in the building from me for every email in the inbox of one of our accounting ladies. By the time we stopped the bleeding the agent had sent out some 600+ emails to all 100 people in our building. Doing the math that would be 60,000 emails in about 5-10 minutes. Think you can be that productive?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Haha, programming can be (and mostly is!) a b!tch.

Worst of it is, most mistakes happen when you start with the "oh this shouldn't be too hard" mentality. It's like the program gods smack you back with a "oh yeah?!".

Oh well, best of luck in future endeavours.