“The address as entered does not match our standardized database.”
My response?
“The error message listed above does not match a meaningful concept.”
How can an address match an ENTIRE database?
After a few minutes of head-scratching and experimentation, I found that the ACTUAL error message should have been,
“The address field can only accept numbers and letters and no special characters.”
Aaaargh computer programs (and programmers) have enough trouble staying on the good side of the software users. Why do quality-control folks allow this kind of cruddy error messaging to exist?
This is a perfect example of a meaningless error message. It contains little factual information and does not tell the user what to do to correct the data entry problem.
Below is a breakdown of what was going through my mind and how I was able to translate this message into something that made sense.
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This nearly-undecipherable message tells me the program is trying to match a field of characters to an entire collection of data which would contain not just addresses, but most likely people’s names, an assortment of dates, maybe prices, and certainly sets of specialised internal data pointers (indexes) as well as hidden scripting processes (stored procedures, triggers, foreign key cascade rules, etc.)
A “real-world” equivalent of this message would be the following message from a farmer,
“The chicken you describe does not match our farm.”
…and don’t get me started on what a “standardized database” could possibly represent.
Well, too late, I’ve started. There’s such thing as a “Relational Database“, a “Hierarchical Database“, an “Object/Relational Database” but to my knowledge there’s no such thing as a “Standardized Database”.
Now what the original software coder may be saying in this message is:
“We used some logic to try to find the address you entered in a list of known standard postal addresses but couldn’t find it.”
However, since I know the address I entered actually exists, and could reasonably assume it to be in the database that the software is using, I started looking at things that may cause an error message.
The first thing to look at was the ‘#’ character I used in the PO Box number. Special characters cause all sorts of problems with database-specific languages (i.e. Perl, MySQL, Oracle/Sybase stored procedures, etc) for reasons I won’t go into here.
After removing the special character and pressing the ‘Save’ button, everything worked as expected. My data was updated in the system.
This was far too much thinking to have to do at 4:45 in the morning.