Stick to the paradigm (even if it sucks)

Today I had the pleasure of fixing a bug in an unashamedly-procedural ASP.NET application, comprised almost entirely of static methods with anywhere from 5-20 parameters each (yuck yuck yuck).

After locating the bug and devising a fix, I hit a wall. I needed some additional information that wasn’t in scope. There were three places I could get it from:

• The database
• Form variables
• The query string

The problem was knowing which to choose, because it depended on the lifecycle of the page — is it the first hit, a reopened item, or a post back? Of course that information wasn’t in scope either.

As I contemplated how to figure the state of the page using HttpContext.Current, my spidey sense told me to stop and reconsider.

Let’s go right back to basics. How did we use to manage this problem in procedural languages like C? There is a simple rule — always pass everything you need into the function. Global variables and hidden state may be convenient in the short-term, but only serve to confuse later on.

To fix the problem, I had to forget about “this page” as an object instance. I had to forget about private class state. I had to forget that C# was an object-oriented language. Those concepts were totally incompatible with this procedural code base, and any implementation would likely result in a big mess.

In fact, it turns out to avoid a DRY violation working out the page state again, and adding hidden dependencies on HttpContext, the most elegant solution was simply to add an extra parameter to every method in the stack. So wrong from a OO/.NET standpoint, but so right for procedural paradigm in place.