Last week, I brought up the issue of the problems developers face in dealing with some everyday type problems with apps. Most of the time, there are two ways of solving an issue, the thorough or the simple. I weighed the pros of each approach.
Now for the verdict. In the issue I faced last week, I took the simple approach. Why? Primarily because taking the thorough approach would have taken too much time to re-implement, and risked damaging the existing code base, which would have been a far worse situation to deal with.
Typically I prefer the thorough approach, since it provides for a longer lifespan of an application, but I also believe in using the right tool for the job. In this case, it meant getting a simple solution in place. The customer could be up and running immediately and we didn't risk breaking the main code base of the application. Even so the "simple" approach took me about a full day of work to bring live.
Just remember that there are about 100 ways to skin a cat, so there can often be several "right" solutions, as long as you way the impact of that method.
So what situations have you run into where you evaluated the thorough vs. the simple? Which route did you take?