Rechnungs Checker 1.0.5¶
397 words on earthlingsoft
Yet another version of Rechnungs Checker has been released. This update brings support for yet another file format, namely that of NetCologne, a local phone company in and around Köln.
With more than two file formats being supported now and things looking like there may be a few more coming, I used this opportunity to make the importing more modular, defining a parsing class which I have several subclasses of to do the actual job of parsing the file if they recognise the file format. I suppose, doing this with plugins would be even more modular and look cooler. Judging from Steffen’s experieces in UnicodeChecker, doing this wouldn’t be too hard. But judging from those experiences as well, nobody but myself will be writing such plugins… so why bother doing this which would only make the apps bundle more complicated, its file larger and may even need extra documentation anyway?
Another change the application saw was a problem that only became apparent after adding support for the O2 file format in the previous version. For a long time, Rechnungs Checker has supported analysis of calls from multiple phone numbers which are on the same phone bill. That’s fairly standard for ISDN lines where you get three numbers for a single line. Living with three people, everyone can have their own number to be called and, as the outgoing number is present on the itemised phone bill as well, this simplifies the analysis as lot. You just have to specify the single outgoing number for each person.
O2 offers a similar data set. It’s called a ‘Partner’ contract where a couple can share a phone bill for some discount. But the situation is slightly different there: Where people don’t call each other in the ISDN case – after all they’ll be living in the same house and have a local telephone exchange that lets them make calls between the different phones for free, in the mobile phone case it’s rather likely that partners phone each other. In that case analysis went wrong as both partners would have both numbers in the list of their numbers. And essentially the first of them in the list would have all calls assigned to him because of this. Thus a little tweak was needed where the outgoing number will override the destination number in case there is a conflict.
