Timeline for user 'about_me' field suggested_buffer_size is too small
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
7 events
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| Oct 4, 2010 at 22:45 | comment | added | Kevin Montrose | @Sky - using it as a concrete limit is, using it as a default buffer size (like the name suggests!) isn't. Your original question makes it clear you want to do the former, which is a contract violation. | |
| Oct 4, 2010 at 10:12 | comment | added | Sky Sanders | sure, i understand the position. curious as to how using the suggested buffer size is an explicit violation of the api contract. | |
| Oct 4, 2010 at 9:24 | comment | added | Dan Dumitru | +1 - IMO, it all comes down too: "its always been (and it will always be) possible to craft a neurotic entry whose HTML version would be in excess of API's suggested_buffer_size for the field" | |
| Oct 4, 2010 at 9:04 | comment | added | Kevin Montrose |
@Sky the two options are: "a concrete number which we say will never change, ... but then we change it when forced to" or "a number which we say is a good buffer size if you're going to allocate one, but which is not guaranteed to be large enough for all values, forever." There isn't any middle ground, unless you want us to return no guidance at all. Bluntly, if you're constraining your data types to the suggested_buffer_size you are explicitly violating the API contract and that's the problem, not whether the number is a perfect indicator (we say in the name that its not!).
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| Oct 4, 2010 at 6:57 | comment | added | Sky Sanders | maybe this is something that deserves a few hours of time on that side of the fence. When you say that we should always be ready to get more data than advertised you are saying that we should guess. and if we guess wrong, data is either truncated or exceptions occur. surely there is a middle ground. | |
| Oct 4, 2010 at 6:56 | comment | added | Sky Sanders | i am not sure i agree with the practice of suggesting a value that is known to be insufficient. It is my experience both when writing SODDI for importing the data dump and in pulling all users that it is not uncommon for a post rendered as html to exceed these suggested values simply by virtue of using the alloted markdown characters. Unfortunately, the only way to gather these metrics is to either have access to the DB and do a metrics run, rendering all markdown fields to get an idea of what a safe margin would be or to use the API to pull all records. | |
| Oct 3, 2010 at 21:50 | history | answered | Kevin Montrose | CC BY-SA 2.5 |