now that's a mess-up!

Uh. Have you ever done something at work, then looked back to see nuclear plants exploding and people running for their lives? Well, I pulled something similar off.

So we're working in a pre-development environment, trying to figure out all the things we need to do to move our corporate portal from Sun to Oracle. I need to find a way to make the portlet repository easier to use. The portlet repository is where people need to go to add portlets to their portal page: say, if they want to show an RSS feed.

In theory, the portlet repository is just a collection of links to portlets, organized into folders. I copy one of the folders and start customizin'. I delete some, rename others, and in general go to town. I then check the result of my work, and my heart skips several beats - the original folder was changed too! I guess in the Oracle world, "copy" means "create a reference that looks like a copy". Crap.

Well, not the end of the world - the portlets that we already placed on the pages are still there, right? Um, NO. All gone. On all the pages. WTF.

Good thing the developer did a backup on Friday. Some things got restored, others are still messed up Katrina-style. In retrospect, this is environment doesn't matter all that much, but still... if something like this happened in production, it would be a interesting scene indeed.