The Daily WTF

Andre has inherited a rather antique ASP .Net WebForms application. It’s a large one, with many pages in it, but they all follow a certain pattern. Let’s see if you can spot it.

protected void btnSearch_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { ArrayList paramsRel = new ArrayList(); paramsRel[“Name”] = txtNome.Text; paramsRel[“Date”] = txtDate.Text; Session[“paramsRel”] = paramsRel; List<Client> clients = Controller.FindClients(); //Some other code }

Now, at first glance, this doesn’t look terrible. Using an ArrayList as a dictionary and frankly, storing a dictionary in the Session object is weird, but it’s not an automatic red flag. But wait, why is it called paramsRel? They couldn’t be… no, they wouldn’t…

public List<Client> FindClients() { ArrayList paramsRel = (ArrayList)Session[“paramsRel”]; string name = (string)paramsRel[“Name”]; string dateStr = (string)paramsRel[“Date”]; DateTime date = DateTime.Parse(dateStr); //More code… }

Now there’s the red flag. paramsRel is how they pass parameters to functions. They stuff it into the

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