Re: date mask in SQL*Loader

DA Morgan wrote:
> Define a discard file and send those records back to be fixing.
>
> Covering for other people's inadequacies is a recipe for working
> evenings and weekends. And no one will remember you did it three
> weeks later except to expect you to do it yet again.

I once worked on a web site that took credit card orders. The web site instructions said to "please enter the credit card number with NO spaces or dashes." It said this very loudly, to the point of distraction. Try as they might, users entered their credit card numbers with spaces and dashes. These were rejected by the system. In fact, the system went so far as to detect dashes and say specifically "hey, you had a dash in there! take it out!" This behavior was known to management but not considered an issue since it was advertised that the dashes and spaces were required.

After some time, management did a usability analysis of how many users coming to the site, and initiating a purchase transaction, but were able to complete the purchase. This is the part I was hired to do. We discovered a lot people bailing out at the credit card form, specifically after typing in a card # with the correct digits, but with those annoying dashes and spaces. It didn't take long to understand why they did so: the delimiters appear on both their card (as spaces) and statements (as dashes) and serve to help chunk up the 16 or so digits so as to enable easy visual verification. It's precisely these people who were making an effort to get the correct numbers into the form. Tthere were many other users who bailed after entering invalid digits, but far fewer than the dashes-and-spaces people.

The usability analysis revealed that about 15% of purchase transactions were lost on the last screen due to the dashes and spaces thing. I proposed that we simply strip non-digits form the form input and use that as the card number. I presented a one-line implementation in perl. During this proposal the original site developer objected, saying that "if these users cannot follow the instructions, we don't want their money."

I'll let you guess what management did with this developer ;)

• JH