PowerDistribution PanelPoles are made safe in different ways?

[pawsey-kbuckley]

TL';DR Doubt that this is going to affect anyone not using Pawsey-local patches

I think the local issue I saw, is tied into the move to PHP8, however,
in coning to diagnose what was happening, wherin a patch that had
been applied (which does some arithmatic on the chassinum-s and
Panel Poles, to allow for the Panel Pole Scheme in use here to be
displayed) had become broken, I saw that in

classes/PowerDistribution.class.php

function MakeSafe(){
    ...
    $this->PanelPole=sanitize($this->PanelPole);
    ...
    $this->PanelPole2=intval($this->PanelPole2);

the two PanelPoles appear to be treated as different types,
and so was wondering why ?

[pawsey-kbuckley]

Thought to take a look at the database schema, in create.sql

CREATE TABLE fac_PowerDistribution (
  ...
  PanelPole varchar(20) NOT NULL,
  ...
  PanelPole2 varchar(20) NOT NULL,
  ...
)

where they are the same type.

[wilpig]

@samilliken and I recently discussed ths and the sanitize function is the correct one. The reasoning is that outside of the US the poles are often not numeric which is what lead to a PHP8 specific change in 5840213

[pawsey-kbuckley]

Funnily enough, after I had fixed up the string<->int issue in our local code,
I then found that I was tripping over the very issue that 5840213 addresses,
however, in the spirit of being explcit as to types, I had added in an extra
explicit type conversion, compared to that commit, at Line 634
in classes/PowerDistribution.class.php, so:

$next = strval(intval($this->PanelPole)+$adder);

because $next is a string, and, even though it may be overkill, using the
explicit strval() there, felt like I was leaving less to trip up over.