My team recently had an issue with a screen in an app allowing users to post a form multiple times. This results in all the posts being processed creating duplicate entries in the database. I didn’t dig into the solution with the team, but it reminded me of all the trouble this type of issue has caused me over the years. Now, I very much appreciate the circuit breaker pattern.

If you don’t have experience with implementing a circuit breaker, you can try a project like Polly.net if you’re using .NET.

http://www.thepollyproject.org/

In 2013 I wrote a post about ASP.NET Web Forms (scarey) where I felt the need to capture a hack to prevent double PostBack requests in the client with a circuit breaker. First, I wrote about debugging double PostBack issues. Then I posted a hack to short circuit the post backs. I had no mention of what motivated the post, I just had the sheer need and possibly panic knowing that codebase, to record these notes so I don’t have to figure it out again.

After reading it again, I wondered if I had the notion to force submit to return false only after the first click or if I found this on Google or StackOverflow? This looks like a nice quick trick that worked for me or I wouldn’t have posted it. I wonder if I was being creative, evolutionary, or a pirate (arrrr).

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I don’t know what a good practice for this is today, but I was shocked to see that I was digging so much to simplify this to a bullet list. I wonder if I ever better encapsulated the circuit breaker for this and I wondered what kind of production-issue-induced-anxiety-nightmares I was having.