Wednesday and Thursday of this week were spent completing and refining our emailed registration link.
Wednesday I worked from home, and after digging through a few errors thrown when I clicked on a registration link, I ran into one I couldn’t fix. It was a simple java.lang null-pointer exception thrown when the code was supposed to parse arguments passed in on the link. Email communication with Mr. Chandler led to liberal use of Eclipse’s debugger. I set a break point in the code where it was supposed to use a method of FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().getExternalContext() to find the url arguments. The hash maps that getRequestMap() produced were monstrous tree diagrams, full of circular calls and null entries.
It was Thursday before Mr. Chandler did the research to dig up a solution, which makes for an excellent Note for Dense Summer Interns: to parse an argument from a url, call FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().getExternalContext().getRequestParametersMap().get("key")
We also wanted to pull out the host server and path from the url, so that we wouldn’t have to create several different hardcoded versions of the link to send from different test and production servers.
Having finished getting acquainted with the mail system, and setting up our registration service, we went to Dunkin’ Donuts to celebrate and talk about database design for the core of the project. Details of that discussion, what came of it, are due tomorrow.
Number of the Day: 32: the number of files open in Eclipse at the same time Thursday afternoon.
Filed under: Jobber's Log | Tagged: Java, JSF
