Reporting data worthless

This is a bug in Garmin Connect that Garmin says they are fixing, but does not have a timeline on. The current workaround is to export the activity, delete it on Garmin Connect, wait a few minutes for the activity to disappear from your reports, import the activity again into Garmin Connect, then immediately change the activity. It should then show up accordingly on the reports.

The other workaround is to log into Garmin Connect and immediately change the activity type after upload. Even 30 seconds is too slow. It has never worked for me, but has for others, so I go with the first workaround.

If you have more than one activity to change I suggest doing it one by one because you really need to do this fairly quickly after you re-import the activity.

wow, that is just staggering. For a company that positions itself as more hardcore than fitbit this massive oversight is very poor.

I work in software and have to say there database structure is a POS or they have very slack developers as this should not be a hard change.

I wish I had a cent for every software engineer or whatever who reckons they can do a better job than Garmin's people. I'm not saying Garmin's are the best, but they do well. I know of very little software that is perfect. If you take that to it's logical conclusion, people who write software........ fill in the blanks.

And my usual one word riposte to people who whinge about Garmin - Windows!

This issue started on November 15th last year after they had shut down Connect for "planned maintenance".

My theory is that the "planned maintenance" actually meant changing or upgrading existing servers. What I think happened is they missed moving or upgrading the routine that dealt with activity updates and it was blown away for good. So what I think is going on is that the routine is triggered by a new activity which runs almost immediately after an activity is added. That's why you miss the train if you don't change it in time. After that it's a static situation unless you delete the activity from the database, re-import it, and edit it right away.

So either the routine to continually update was lost completely or it was rendered incompatible by the maintenance back in November. Based on the more than 3 months is has taken so far, it appears to me that they must be rebuilding it from scratch. What further complicates it is that there are new Garmin products with new features that also need to be supported now so the needed routine is now more complex than it used to be.

Of course, that's just my theory.

I wish I had a cent for every software engineer or whatever who reckons they can do a better job than Garmin's people. I'm not saying Garmin's are the best, but they do well. I know of very little software that is perfect. If you take that to it's logical conclusion, people who write software........ fill in the blanks.

And my usual one word riposte to people who whinge about Garmin - Windows!

I use *nix! I've said this before but the point of software development isn't to write 100% perfect code, it's to get your bugs down to a _reasonable_ level. 1 per 1000 lines of code is considered pretty good. So is testing before going live. Also, keeping the old version in case you missed something during testing...

Unless you've got a reason not to, the simple & effective way to code it would be to reference the database records. Not run some update method that generates a new set of immutable data each time a new entry is added. Cache the results somewhere if you're worried about database over-utilisation, that would happen on data access - not entry - and may even decrease DB hits.