Bad Vendors

[gopher]

I know there are a number of people on here who have had more then 10 minutes of web development experience so this will make sense to those, applogies to everyone else.

We have been dealing with a rather bad software vendor who has been contracted to write a web app for us.

we have been struggling with their in-eptitude for some time but today something happened which underlines the type of issues we've had rather nicely.

Part of the app is required to utilise some of our back end systems and we have written, tested and deployed a webservice to enable them to do this.

They have decided, despite using .net, to build a query string and perform a http get to consume the web methods rather than consume it directly through xml web services.

They have emailed us because of an issue with our part of the system - apparantly when trying to pass a string value which contains an ampersand the call fails to pass any more of the string!

We pointed out the value of URL Encoding and got the following response

badvender said:

Hi, Thanks for your ideas, but from our point of view an ampersand is a standard character and we think that the (our system) code should be able to deal with this. We were given a choice of different ways to send the information to (our system), we have chosen the way described in the email below, and if this cannot cope with the ampersand character then this should have been made clear from the start.

Sorry no reason to post this other than to get the frustration off my chest.

Cheers

Paul