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At a very large bank here in Australia & NZ, all XML messages going through the main message bus had a trailing space character appended to the end, which broke
by geoffmunn 5y ago
At a very large bank here in Australia & NZ, all XML messages going through the main message bus had a trailing space character appended to the end, which broke XML validation on the receiving endpoint.
So the solution was for all endpoints to trim the very last character - not just if it was a space, but to chop off the last character. Apparently this had been the solution for years.
This worked really well until one day someone (probably a new grad) saw the character issue and figured they'd fix it.
A bank-wide P1 incident occurred because every single XML message was now unparsable due to the malformed closing '</xml ' tag. Every single application in the bank had to do an emergency update on its XML parser.
- potamic 5y agoWhy didn't they just rollback the fix instead?
- ozychhi 5y agoD'oh! How did they not think of that
- ukj 5y agoHow do you rollback typos in messages you've already sent?
- CuriousCosmic 5y agoWhat do you mean "rollback". You say this like this bank had version control and it wasn't just recently introduced.
- lqet 5y agoIsn't XML with trailing whitespace still valid XML?
- reificator 5y agoNot if your validation is `/</xml>$/`.
- vishnugupta 5y agoChesterton’s Fence https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/ https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/