Database Update for SOTAGoat app?

That’s one way, or you can return a specific answer if you control local DNS.

Actually, no it doesn’t. I’ve done a quick network trace on it. After doing a DNS lookup on www.sotadata.org.uk it goes straight to port 443.

So I was right for the wrong reason; any fake site would need a trusted certificate (assuming the code validates the certificate; I’d expect it to be using some library that does).

I can’t help feeling that it would have been far easier not to change the format of the summitslist.csv file. Given that there was never a formal specification of it, this cannot be the only application that is “sensitive”. It’s possible that just putting back the spurious null column and fixing that anomalous date field would do the trick.

Martyn

I’ll fix the date column, but adding another column requires almost a complete rewrite to avoid using the CSV library I use.

Actually I can probably do it on the SQL side. But I am more of a systemd sort of person. I shouldn’t have to rewrite code for an app that’s not been developed in years relying on a column that’s never contained information

We’re in iPad/iPhone territory here, so not much scope for hacks within the client (I don’t jailbreak). It would have to be DNS fakery.

If it were a PC application I’d probably be patching the binary to use a different URL. Of course I’d also be able to restore its application data from my backups so in the short term I wouldn’t need to.

Martyn

OK, I’ve broken the nice, functional and correct code.

I agree, especially as the spurious column isn’t named in the column headers. That probably means that it’s not really a column; it’s just that whatever generated the old CSV file treated comma as a column terminator rather than a column separator.

Long term it’s a really bad idea to maintain this bug.

It would be good to have a specification of what consumers of this file can rely on though.

Martyn

Basic off by one error, no doubt, whacking the comma on the end of the final column, rather than not.

That certainly helps. SOTA Goat now downloads the file, processes the associations, and then crashes. On restart it says that the update failed and invites you to try again. If you decline, you find that the database has in fact been installed and looks more or less OK. It doesn’t strip the quotes, so all the names are quoted - untidy but it’s usable.

Thanks for doing the wrong thing :slight_smile:

Martyn

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:roll_eyes:
As far as I know Log4OM and Log4OM2 were just adjusted to work with the “new” summitslist.csv. So that is potentially broken now instead.
I guess it was discussed previously but a specification how the summits.csv offically looks like would be great for developers.

73 Joe

Martyn and Andrew,
thank you for this discussion and for providing the “fix”.
Now SOTA Goat is again working for me.
73, Andy

One would hope that the fix would be to make the code robust enough to cope with either. I think somebody said that they had made it check for at least N columns rather than an exact number. This is obviously a good idea as it allows new columns to be added later.

Martyn

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That was the Log4OM author I think?

Goat is still busted despite heroic efforts (at least on my phone):

  • It does the download
  • It starts parsing the contents
  • It works alphabetically through the associations until somewhere at or slightly after R9U…then it crashes.

I wonder how much more effort is reasonable to save an app that really ought to just get a proper update from the developer, or a proper burial.

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Confirmed: It loads until R9U.
I did not notice this before because I was already happy when it loaded DL …

Any particular R9U summit it stops on?

It appears to have parsed up through R9U/SO-157 correctly, so I assume R9U/SO-158 is the culprit.

I do like your humour :wink:

Nothing obviously wrong about that summit - other than it’s a bit more than 10,048,500 bytes into the file.

Yep, now the database updates but just up to R9U (265 summits) - no North America at all. But y’all have made a lot of progress - before your recent fixes, it would download but not finish any associations.

Derek, WF4I