Catching up from last time, PayPal’s MPL lib for Android has been somewhat hit or miss for us. It works great, as long as you’re not on a wifi only device (irregardless of the Android OS version). We filed a ticket, we got a quick response that they were aware of the problem, and we waited. And we waited. We heard nothing back from developer technical services for 10 days.
Low and behold, Bill over on the original thread makes note that a version 1.5 had appeared on the site, dated May 18th. Odd…we had looked on the 23rd before we filed our support ticket and saw no new version. He recommended we give it a try to see it resolved the issue.
We loaded it up in a couple of our projects, clean, build and no, it didn’t fix the issue at first glance. Or does it? Upon further digging around in the forums, we see an old post from April had come back to the top, claiming that version 1.5 had fixed the issue. So we check the changelog…but there isn’t one. There is a readme.txt, but it offers no insight if the version fixes the problem. We ping DTS, we get no response.
So we start digging through the developer doc and the code and low and behold, though it is not mentioned there is a single new line of code in some of the examples:
<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_WIFI_STATE"/>Sure enough, though the docs fail to mention it, this magic line in the AndroidManifest.xml in combination with the version 1.5 MPL lib resolves the issue.
This was good news, but also left us scratching our head. Developer evangelist Praveen Alavilli reached out and made note that he had published this information on his blog on the 27th. That’s great…but it’s not on the main PayPal X MPL site, and the forum posts (there were others besides ours) was never updated. And DTS never updated the ticket with said information or fix, not until we pointed out the error in the documentation.
Which brings us to the following: if you have a library, have a proper public issue tracker that you update. Have a single location for updates and releases so we don’t have to play track-down-the-update game. It would just make everyone’s life a lot easier.
