July 2009 – Page 3

Being an integration specialist is never dull.

I am going to excerpt from an IM chat with one of the programmers on my team, about an SSIS package we are developing.

He:: I got:; why the \r\n escaped in the mail?
i used the xslt to transform the xml column into a string variable, and later i use this variable as the MailMessage.Body
Me:: how do you set message body on the Send Mail task?
He:: i'm using the script task and using the smtpclient
Me:: You put in the carriage return and newline escaped in your body, what do you expect?
He: i expect a real new line
Me:: Why? That's ridiculous. what do you mean by "real"?
He:: I expect:

Here is the error information: C:\temp31 does not exist!
———————————————–
Please do not reply to this automated message.

Something like that.
Me:: FOR GOD SAKES
I KNOW WHAT A NEW LINE AND CARRIAGE RETURN LOOK LIKE
I mean: why do you use the word "real"…
What makes \r\n "real" to you?
Think about it.

Sigh.

At this point, everybody who knows me can tell this is a verbatim conversation, right?

To continue:

He:: I used the wrong word, sorry.
Me:: No, don't say "sorry". Figure it out!
Why is \r\n "real"?
Think why you said it.
they are only characters, why are they "real" ?
\r\n is real because…
He:: I thought they are carriage return in text
Me: Really? If you are writing a letter to your mother, and you write \n\r does she interpret it as lf cr?
The letter is text.
[A long pause here]
When you wrote that string in your code what did you do?
did you write x + "\r\n" + y in the script task?
He:: Almost
I'm doing it in XSLT, so concat(x, "\r\n", y)
Me:: <rofl>
That is utterly ridiculous.
Let me ask you about your mother again
Does she read \r\n as CRLF?
He:: Never.
Me:: That's right, never.

So why do *you* read it that way? Why does it seem "real" to you?

I will tell you why, but you will kick yourself… It's because you are a C# programmer .

\r\n is not "real. It is just a convention in some languages. There is nothing "real" about it.
Your mother and XSLT don't speak C#.

It's not XSLT's fault, or your mother's.

In XSLT he ended up using <xsl:text> to force a line break in his text e-mail message. That's okay, but please note you can use properly encoded entity references to create a CRLF in XSLT, just like you can in C#.

As an interesting side-note, this project was being written in SSIS 2005. SSIS 2005 script tasks don't speak C# either. So, even if we were not using XSLT to formulate the message from the XML source containing the error information, we would have to use a VB convention, not \r\n, to get the job done.

If he were sending the message body as HTML rather than text for this error notice, he'd have to use <BR/>. SSIS 2005 script and HTML are two more environments that don't understand \r\n.

There's always a way to do it. But there is nothing inherently "real" about \r\n, no matter a person who is single-language-centric might think.

I want to be fair and say that this particular programmer is usually very agile-minded as we hook differently-abled types of code to each other in an integrated application. I'm not pointing him out in particular.

We live in the Matrix

I'm trying to say: in the world we live in now, nobody can afford to be language-centric. I'm trying to say: none of this is real.

Use what's best for the customer and best for the product. Don't get hung up on what's cool or what a vendor recommends. Don't get freaked out by the little places, like representation of characters, that are different in each environment.

Just take a breath, get your bearings, you'll find the right "words" in the right dialect. If what you're trying to express is important, have a little faith and realize there's a way to do it, in any language, no matter where in the world you are.

And be careful out there.

Month: July 2009

XSLT and your mother don’t speak C#

Sigh.

It's not XSLT's fault, or your mother's.

We live in the Matrix