[mythtv-users] WARNING: SchedulesDirect users: server currently returning bogus results

[f-myth-users at media.mit.edu]

Check your listings!  Make sure they aren't blank!

Longer story:  I noticed that my SD run had downloaded nothing last
night and figured it was a network-connectivity problem on my end
(I've seen this before).  Tried running it manually just now and it
downloaded a defective dataset which wiped out all my listings and
caused zero items to be currently scheduled.

Watching the by-hand download showed it doing very little, and so I
logged into my SD account to see if the site was up, only to find a
lurid warning at the top of the page about server problems.  But by
then, the download had finished and MFDB had proceeded to zeroize all
of my existing listings before failing to replace them with anything.

Now, I -actually- download using tv_grab_na_dd, and I save the last
few weeks of data for doing postmortem analysis, so I was able to step
back to my last good download (early morning 12/18) and stuff it back
into mythfilldatabase, restoring my listings.  But I suspect that most
users won't have that available.  (OTOH, perhaps 0.21/0.22 do better
data validation on their inputs?)  And I'll bet most users -also-
don't happen to have just logged into SD today and/or read the forums.
(I just checked and the last post at all was 3 days ago, in support;
the last post in announcements was in August.  -Finally- I noticed the
line up in the graphic header there announcing server problems.  If I
hadn't been specifically looking for it, I'd have missed it.)

My normal tools check that the XML ends with "</SOAP-ENV:Envelope>"
before assuming the data's any good, since I've gotten both zero-length
and something-but-truncated before due to network issues on my end.
This one passed those tests, but it was only 780K instead of 32meg,
and ended with these lines:

    <schedule program='MV000356820000' station='10201' time='2010-01-01T23:15:00Z' duration='PT01H45M' stereo='true' closeCaptioned='true'/>
    <SOAP-ENV:Fault>
    <faultcode xmlns:ns1='urn:TMSWebServices'>ns1:ZTVWebServiceTechnicalError</faultcode>
    <faultstring>An unexpected error has occurred. Please try again later. If this message reappears, please contact support.</faultstring>
    <detail><faultnumber>100</faultnumber></detail>
    </SOAP-ENV:Fault>
    </SOAP-ENV:Body>
    </SOAP-ENV:Envelope>

That "Fault" line should instead have been followed by lines of the form:

    </schedules>
    <programs>
    <program id='EP000000211110'>
    <title>20/20</title>

etc. I will obviously be updating my automation to be doing more
validation (like ensuring no fault codes and ensuring that every
major section that's supposed to be there is there).

So maybe current mfdb will correctly reject this XML as being
malformed (that <schedules> wasn't even closed) and won't nuke
your listings first, but check just in case.