Notes

This week, I developed a REST service to set up our service manager (this is a configuration for managing a 1cFresh instance). Deploying the development environment is a regular task for us, and every time the manager's database had to be tuned by hand: tweaking the storefront, changing application addresses, overwriting scheduled tasks, and so on.

The implementation was simple. Come up with a JSON structure, write a parser, find a code in the configuration, make it work by external call, and make sure you don't break anything. Routine work, in general, but I love to do such things from time to time: I mean, to look around and try to figure out which of the daily tasks is annoying enough.

This one is a good example. To be frank, setting up the Service Manager wasn't a problem (launching the app and fiddling with the settings), but it was a thing to pay attention & spend time to. What do we have now:

1. There is a JSON file with all the settings;
2. There is a REST service for its processing;
3. There is a script that will put the first into the second;
4. There is a pipeline that will do it all by itself.

In short, a boot was rubbing a leg, and now it isn't. Yahoo!

25 February 2023 1С work

The colleague grumbled that if you think like that, then the configurator will be Zhiguli, and the EDT will be Kama1 (this is an electric car that has been developed somewhere in the depths of KAMAZ for many years and still can’t gather strength and, finally, show the wonder to the world).

Well, I try to look at things with optimism. I think the platform and its IDE are such haul trucks. No one in their right mind rides them on household chores, but these beasts are irreplaceable on a cut!

20 February 2023 1С

The more I explore the Bitrix24 REST interface, the more I am amazed at how different its developers mindsets are. It is expressed in different ways.

Let's take, for example, the interface of deals and product rows related to them. There is no amount field in the table of the products: like, you need the amount for each line – count it yourself, that's it. However, there is the amount field at the document level! Can you guess what the field is named?

AMOUNT? DEAL_AMOUNT? DOCUMENT_AMOUNT? AMOUNT_TOTAL?

You didn't guess, the correct answer is OPPORTUNITY.

Where'd I digress? Yeah, a product line. It contains a product, a VAT rate, and a unit of measure. All three entities are completely independent: each has a separate table with auxiliary information and its own unique identifier. It is logical to assume that identifiers are stored in the product line: product ID, VAT rate ID, and unit ID.

Well, yes, but no. The product field actually contains ID, but for the VAT rate field it's a rate value. What's for the unit of measure field? Well, it contains a measurement code ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Database normalization? What? What does it mean? Back off, man, you're distracting us from work.

15 October 2022 work Bitrix

For the last month I have been rewriting standard data exchange between FirstBit ERP and Bitrix for a client task. Co-workers doing the same on the Bitrix side prepared a huge mapping for this case: which field on the 1C side should be transferred to which Bitrix field (and vice versa).

They published this mapping as Google Docs tables, in the interface of which you can see users using any document at this moment — both logged in and anonymous. Anonymous ones traditionally are displaying as animals.

Colleagues generally prefer to work anonymously. As a result, I definetely used to feel like a Disney princess: you start working in the morning, and anonymous quokkas, penguins and chinchillas roll out from everywhere :-)

18 September 2022 work Bitrix meanwhile

Slack, of course, is a thing to scold. For being slow, for having bugs, for notifications. However, I just love his stubs in case there are no new messages.

Look at this cuteness:

Why do we need psychotherapists at all?

Or this:

Geez-Louise, Slack, hold on. You're not the first who advices this, believe me.

25 August 2022 meanwhile

Let's speak a bit about organization of the code. If you need to describe a set of objects with common properties, think about whether this description should be divided into separate methods, each of which intended to describe one specific object?

Let's look at this example — a method that describes tabular parts of documents suitable for some task:

SupportedTypes["Document.SupplierPricesEntering"]   = "Prices";
SupportedTypes["Document.OpeningBalancesEntering"]  = "CustomerAccounts,VendorAccounts";
SupportedTypes["Document.Requisition"]              = "InventoryAndServices";

Everything seems fine, right? Descriptions are there; tabular parts are listed; splitting them by comma doesn't look expensive at all.

However, there are many documents in the method. Eventually, some colleague (or you) will need to refer to another tabular part of the document, which is already mentioned in the method. Something will distract they, they will forget to look for an existing line and something like this will turn out:

SupportedTypes["Document.SupplierPricesEntering"]   = "Prices";
SupportedTypes["Document.OpeningBalancesEntering"]  = "CustomerAccounts,VendorAccounts";
SupportedTypes["Document.Requisition"]              = "InventoryAndServices";

<...>

SupportedTypes["Document.OpeningBalancesEntering"]  = "PayrollDeductions";

As a result, a part of description will be erased, and it's good if the related functionality is covered by tests.

Conclusion? Well, you can write a helper method that will take the document type and the name of one table part as input. The helper will add items to the SupportedTypes map and ensure that the data already added is not lost.

However, if you need a better solution, then consider doing as I wrote at the beginning of this note: split the method into auxiliary methods. One method contains description for one document only (for all its tabular sections). Something like:

Procedure AddOpeningBalancesEnteringDocument(SupportedTypes)

    TabularSections = New Array;

    TabularSections.Add("CustomerAccounts");
    TabularSections.Add("VendorAccounts");
    TabularSections.Add("PayrollDeductions");

    SupportedTypes["Document.Requisition"] = StrConcat(TabularSections, ",");

EndProcedure

What do we get here? Firstly, nobody will accidentally erase the description of the document. Secondly, SonarQube will be pleased: it is highly likely to begin swearing at repeating literals with the names of tabular parts, if the helper is implemented instead of code splitting.

7 August 2022 1С

Someone told me about the Croatian comic strips NOT/BUT at the beginning of last year, when I was seriously learning to draw. Each strip there is about some kind of traumatic or simply gloomy thought that comes into the artist’s head while working. The idea is to push a reader in the right direction and give them a more practical perspective on the situation they're in.

I quit drawing a year later, at the end of February: it became clear that I no longer had time for a hobby. But comics are completely universal; look through, even if you have no idea what a kneaded eraser is :-)

All these endless soul-searching are well known to any professional, and the way out of them is not always obvious. Especially if you are angry, tired, and the deadline for the project expired somewhere last week.

23 Jule 2022 work meanwhile

Oh, shoot! Just watched the video and realized that I got used to writing OK in morning statuses when asked “how do you feel today”. Like, everything is normal with me, I'm alive and doing well, nothing affects my work, etc.

Now I'm afraid to guess what colleagues thought about me. I hope they also did not know that okay in the answer to such a question does not mean okay at all :-)

22 Jule 2022 English work

The other day, I was working with cookies in one of my scripts. While searching for the optimal solution, I came across an absolutely charming (100% working, by the way) tip from StackOverflow:

You can get a CookieJar object from the session with session.cookies, and use pickle to store it to a file.

So, literally: keep your cookies in a jar, and to store them, pickle them. The jar with pickled cookies, by the way, can be put on the shelf later.

How can you not love python after that, huh?

P.S. While writing this post, I got curious – why pickle and not serialization? So, briefly: this is the way.

28 May 2022 Python

As soon as I removed Google Fonts from my blog, I had to remove embedded tweets as well.

How did it work before? I want to link a tweet — I simply insert the link to it. The build script replaces it with an HTML block, then Twitter founds this block and replaces it with the text of the tweet (and some useful links as well). This commit shows you how it worked.

How does it work now? You're right, it does not! Twitter is blocked in Russia, so its javascript works with VPN enabled only.

The solution: I had to screen all the tweets that I once referred to and add them to the notes in the form of pictures with links. Whoever needs the original will turn on VPN and go to Twitter, and the rest, at least, can read the text.

A few words about the technical side. I was too lazy to screen each tweet manually, so I was thinking about how to automate the process. At first, I came across only services that were ready to solve the problem for some pathetic ten dollars (thanks guys, maybe, one day…), but then I came across the perfect tool: a console script for Node.js.

Nothing that you don't need. Pure functionality. You give a tweet to it. It gives you a picture back:

npx snap-tweet https://twitter.com/PossumEveryHour/status/1506148678461014016

That's all. I want to donate the author, really.

I thought about attaching snap-tweet to my build script (so that it would be like before: I insert a link to a tweet, and then it generates a picture by itself and puts it where it needs to be). Decided that I'm not gonna do it. Rude violation of KISS, and indeed… There's enough entropy in the world so far. Especially now.

21 Marth 2022 blog webdev Node.js JavaScript

If the type of operation is the sale of goods or real estate, then open the common form AdvancesPickFormWithVAT with the parameters defined in the PickParameters structure. The callback is EditPrepaymentOffsetEnd method, defined in the same module; pass it the AdditionalParameters structure. The form needs to be opened so that it locks the whole interface.

However, if the type of operation is a return to the supplier, then open the general form AdvancesPickFormWithVAT with the parameters defined in the PickParameters structure. The callback is the EditPrepaymentOffsetEnd method, defined in the same module; pass it the AdditionalParameters structure. The form needs to be opened so that it locks the whole interface.

I hope you won't confuse.

16 Marth 2022 1С code smell

A year ago, damn it. Okay, hello everyone! Johnny Slowpoke is here! Today we will throw out Google Fonts from my blog. I used to load the main font (PT Sans) from this service, but it makes almost no sense without cross-domain caching. Frankly speaking, the only point to do this further is if a server on which the site is running is slow, so it is faster to load fonts from Google.

I host my blog on GitHub servers and have no complaints about performance. So, I'm self-hosting PT Sans now, and you know what? The difference is dramatic. When updating a page before, there was clearly a noticeable delay between loading the page and loading the font. For now, it is barely recognizable. If you have a blog and want to try to self-host fonts — here is a cool service that solves the problem in a few clicks.

Don't forget to put a big, nice star on the repository!

19 February 2022 blog webdev

It is a bit late to sum up, isn't it? Well, the previous couple of months have been, um, tight, so I had no actual time to sit down and think. Now I'm on vacation for 2021 – so no time like the present. I'm writing, like, from the past.

Write out each achievement doesn't attract me at all. The year definitely turned out to be good: I did a lot of complex work on FirstBit ERP (wrote new modules, rewrote existing ones, crushed bugs, wrote functional and load tests – yes, there were countless things). This had a good effect both on the configuration itself and on the profits of my company. In addition, I passed 1C expert exam and a PostgreSQL professional exam. Hip-hip-hooray.

There were fails as well. I still feel lazy to jot them down, but the main one is obvious – I became monstrously fat and instead of losing ten kilograms (that was the original plan) – I gained five more.

Looking back, the root of most of the problems over the past year is this: I focused too much on task flow. They were all interesting in their own way, from a carefully written technical task to challenges like “find a problem in the code using your witcher's instincts”. You do one task, another, a third, a hundredth, and you do not notice that you have ignored almost everything except work. As a result, you get a lot of experience, but the world dries up to the Configurator window and there is no strength to somehow apply this experience. Unhealthy bullshit.

In short, if you imagine me as a character in some video game, it looks like this: attack and intelligence have grown noticeably over the year, but health, agility, charisma, and almost everything else in general, have dropped. Now I need to do something to deal with this mess.

You know what? I'll take ten kilometers run for a start.

Maybe, birdie, maybe.

8 February 2022 work

I'll tell you about a funny and a little embarrassing case that I took apart in January. The essence in a nutshell: a huge auto-test based on Vanessa, which is intended to check the VAT calculation, falls somewhere near the end.

I start investigating. First, I look at the screenshots in Allure: OK, the reason is obvious – in one of the documents, the conditional appearance for the field with the VAT amount doesn't work. The test expected it to be unavailable if the VAT rate is zero, but it turned out to be available somehow.

It's a mess, it needs to be fixed! I look at the condition in the code: well, it locks the field if the VAT rate is in the list of “zero” rates (list of VAT rates whose rate is equal to zero). Everything appears to be simple and logical. What the hell could possibly go wrong here?

Well, I try to reproduce the bug manually. And there, all of a sudden, everything is nice: the conditional appearance works as it should. Floating bug, or what? I run the auto-test again, at the right moment I jump in with the debugger and find some outright garbage: in the list of “zero” rates, besides themselves, there are a bunch of empty links!

Frankly speaking, I was scratching the back of my head. The document receives this list from the common module with this code. An empty ref from here, even theoretically, cannot be obtained. Moreover, the module has the “Reuse Return Values” option ​​enabled, and the function is actually executes once somewhere at the beginning of the test, before all complex data manipulations. So, the test cannot affect it in any way, in theory.

Is it a dead end? Well, experienced colleagues have probably already guessed everything, but I had to dance around the bug and even check the standard, until got the following: return values ​​cache in 1C can be changed. I mean, not by calling RefreshReusableValues​​(), but by changing reusable values directly.

How? Well, if you get some values ​​from a cached common module, and they are not of a primitive type (string, number, etc.), you will not get the value itself, but a pointer to it somewhere in memory. You write this pointer to a variable and try to change it – you change the cache.

It's that simple, yes. This is what happened in my case: the form of another document called the method that generates the list of “zero” rates. Having received a list of values, it added an empty ref to it and used it in its logic. Thus, each time this form opens, the list cache contains more and more empty refs, which eventually broke the document at the other end of the configuration.

In a good way, the platform should throw exceptions when developer trying to change the cache, but until this happens, you have to take care yourself. For example, when developing cached modules, return immutable data types from them (FixedStructure instead of Structure, FixedArray instead of Array, and so on). True, this is not a 100% protection: firstly, fixed types are not applicable everywhere, and secondly, even in the latest versions of the SSL, this is far from being done everywhere. Do you know many configurations not based on SSL?

Sonar also know nothing about the problem, as well as less popular software. No silver bullet, in short – check your code, look at the code of your colleagues and try not to forget about another elegant way to bang ourselves in the foot.

8 February 2022 1С work

Last week I visited Moscow for Infostart Event 2021:

• Listen to numbers of interesting reports — check;
• Meet a few cool people in real life — check;
• Chat with friends — check!

As a result, I suddenly felt rested despite the flights, stress, and fuss. I think it's because I'm working remotely, so it was really cool to look at so many colleagues in real life (not as a stream of electrons, I mean).

In order not to get up to fly twice, I passed the first test for PostgreSQL administration in the PostgresPro office. There are three more tests ahead, and the final one does not exist at all yet — but the walking one will master the road, I guess.

16 November 2021 1С done PostgreSQL

A few days ago, there was a link to 1Ci certificate in the team chat (a colleague passed their junior course). I go over and see no auth form, no errors — I just get a PDF file. Everything is OK, right? Well, then I open the file:

Honestly, I am even delighted. We need to implement this UX in our products: you press, for example, the “print” button for a document, and it gives you a PDF! And inside it — a link to another PDF! And inside it — “entity is not filled”, so go fill.

You can sell it as a Russian way of dealing with errors. This is, like, for historical reasons! Blame all the damned matryoshkas, and Koschei with his needle. It is, as you remember, in the egg, and it is in the duck, which is in the rabbit, tucked into the chest, and further along the chain of nesting.

30 October 2021 1С work

I have two monitors. I use the second one during meetings in Zoom or when playing together with friends (in both cases it's convenient to bring the people's cameras there). There are more examples when it's useful, but often the device is simply idle. In order not to be distracted, I decided to turn it off.

What is the ambush here: it is inconvenient to enable or disable the second monitor via OS (a few clicks, and you need to scroll, and all the time you get confused where to go — in “Screen settings” or “Personalization”). I would like one command, and the command on a hotkey. And, ideally, from the script to rule all this.

I did not find the script, but I found a ready-made utility — MultiMonitorTool. It's free. Works under the Windows 10 without problems. The commands below turn on / off the 2nd monitor:

MultiMonitorTool.exe / disable 2
MultiMonitorTool.exe / enable 2
MultiMonitorTool.exe / switch 2

For some reason, when you turn on a monitor via enable or switch, it's positioned incorrectly sometimes (for example, before it was turned off, it was on the right, and after turning it on, it was on the left). This is fixable. First, let's save the configuration at the moment when both monitors are on:

MultiMonitorTool.exe / SaveConfig Monitors.cfg

And then, when you need to turn on the monitor, load the saved config:

MultiMonitorTool.exe / LoadConfig Monitors.cfg

The utility can do a lot more (for example, one of the commands flips application windows between monitors). Follow the link above for the description.

16 October 2021 workplace

There is a path to a CSV file. You need to open it, read the header (first line), find the Salary column and display the top 10 salaries.

Link

Threw in my two cents just to complete the picture. If you forget about stability, readability, and performance — you can cut it in half. Here it was obvious from the very beginning that it would be shorter in bash and clearer in Python, so I just wrote it as I was used to.

What was useful: there are a bunch of examples in other languages ​​in the comments to the post. Frankly speaking, I haven’t come across some of them; it was really curious to look at the syntax and try to understand the way to solve the task.

In general, the whole story reminded Eugene Stepanishev's hobby — to write the output of the American “beer song” in all languages ​​in a row. By the way, Tonsky's issue looks as fun for me too — too trivial to seriously compare something on its basis.

What was funny: for a couple of colleagues, the 1C code caused such acute vision problems that they considered it necessary to report it :-) I partly understand the desire to assert itself on the stereotype “1C is bad, mkay?”, but it's the wrong case. The preference in syntax is nothing but a matter of taste, and besides it, the solution in 1C is no different from solutions in any other language without a built-in library for parsing CSV.

2 October 2021 1С

For the last year this site has been working on a simple platform: statics, GitHub and my domain. All the pages were pre-generated and placed in a GitHub's repository with GitHub Pages enabled.

I collected statics using a script. It was working with a list of text files, pedantically arranged in folders. The script rummaged through them and generated HTML files. Then I manually pushed them to the repository.

This scheme worked well, but the number of clicks annoyed me. Here is the script pull, and there is the script pull, and then you have to tinker with the git. I wanted it to be simpler.

At some point, I figured out that not only the deployment of statics, but also the assembly can be shifted onto the shoulders of GitHub. I put together some thoughts and added two more repositories:

1. A repository of initial data. Here I put the content of the site: the text files and a bit of metadata (page titles, dates of pages creation, tags for notes, and so on).
2. A repository of the script for generating statics. In addition to the script itself, I put various assets here (icons, styles, manifests — in general, everything that doesn't need to be generated every time, but you have to “put” it next to the resulting HTML).

Then I wrote an action that wakes up with every push to the repository with the initial data. Shortly, its logic:

1. Clone the repository with statics and the repository with the generating script;
2. Update the repository with statics using the generating script;
3. Push changes of the repository with static to the main branch;
4. Notify the owner (me) via Telegram.

Voilà! Now, whenever the repository with the original data changes, the GitHub immediately (well, as soon as possible — within a minute) updates the repository with the site and deploys it via GitHub Pages. A bonus is a web interface to manage the site (in fact, the GitHub site). No Code. :-)

While I'm at it, I added links for editing pages directly to the site (the pencil icon in the upper-right corner). This is intended as a convenience for me, but anyone who finds a typo can send a PR. Thank you in advance!

29 September 2021 blog done

The nice episode of the “We Are Doomed” IT podcast about developer burnout. No insights, but you can hear something useful for yourself. I liked the analogy with video games, somewhere close to the middle:

There was such a game — Diablo. RPG, all sorts of spells, you know. A character has mana and health, and when you have no mana to cast… Ha, I sound like a nerd! Well, nevermind. Briefly speaking, when you have no mana to cast, it's taken from your health.

— Doctor Cat

22 September 2021 work videogames