When your browse won't go forwards and backwards - Gotchas I've found

[Mike Grigsby]

There are two things I've run into that cause browses to stop going forwards or backwards (well, if you can't go forward, then you probably won't have to worry about going backwards).

1.   as a space in a cell will kill it. Do a Google search on " " and one link even calls it the "doomsday tag."

2. Improperly formed XHTML in a column.

If you know of more, post them.  Hopefully it will help someone who has spent as much time as I have trying to diagnose the problem of a broken browse.

[Rob Mikkelsen]

Mike,

Can I assume that simply replacing the nonbreaking space with its decimal equivaent (& # 160) works correctly?

Would this explain why there are times when I cannot get the browse to advance or sort on a different column selection?

Thanks!

Rob Mikkelsen

[Mike Grigsby]

Rob, I think it is the culprit in the browse not moving forward or backwards. I think I've used the escape character, but it also handles a regular space okay too. I thought I would add it to the forum because I keep running into it and forgetting how I fixed it<G>.

[Rob Mikkelsen]

Mike,

I changed all my non-breaking spaces to the numeric equivalent but have yet to put it online to test it.  I did notice, however, that NetTalk uses a slew of these.  Is this an issue for CapeSoft as well?

Thanks for the post.  If this is the problem, you have just saved me HOURS of debugging to try to find it.  Don't ever change... <g>

Rob Mikkelsen

[Rob Mikkelsen]

Mike,

Well,  changing the nonbreaking spaces to ascii equivalents didn't do it - in fact the problem seems to be more persistent now.  Time to look at the XHTML but I don't have much in the browse that's giving me grief.

Clicking a header to change sort orders does not work, nor do the next/previous buttons.  When I manually refresh the page, my previous sort selection is applied.

If I verify the XHTML and still can't make it work, I will move it over to the HELP forum! <g>

Rob Mikkelsen

[Mike Grigsby]

I found that just putting in the spaces seems to work, but I don't know your circumstances.

E.g. 'SysID:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Date:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;' would just be  'SysID:   Date:   '

[Rob Mikkelsen]

I put a bunch of icons on the top of the screen with links to various pages.  I found that my xhtml code was not correct (not properly closing an img tag) and did not have the trailing slash after the hr command.  I fixed all that but it still would not work properly.  I then removed all the icons and put in one simple hyperlink and it still would not work.  Without any xhtml the forward/back and sort order worked just fine.

To make a long story short, I had put the <!-- Net:WebButtonBar --> command "before the form" that put it in the <div> section.  I changed it to "before <div>" and it works great!

Lesson to avoid another "gotcha" - do not put web source procedures within the browse <div> or you are most likely to cause the browse updates to fail.

Thanks for your patience, Mike!  I like your idea of putting these nuggets in this forum and will try to do the same myself.

Rob Mikkelsen

[Bruce]

Hi Rob,

If it's inside the <div> then it'll get regenerated (and resent) when the browse page changes.
ie on a sort-header change, prev / next and so on.

If it's inside the div, then it needs to be perfect xHtml. If the browse fails to work then I'm 99% sure it's not perfect (yet).

You should be ok to put it inside the div, if you want it refreshed all the time, but of course if it's static it's better outside the div anyway.

tip: if you have the project define
NetShowSend=>1
set in your app, then _outgoing_ responses from the server will be sent to DebugView as well. This is helpful to see what is going to the browser, and so where the bad html is. FireBug is also good for inspecting incoming async html.

Cheers
Bruce

[Rob Mikkelsen]

If it's inside the div, then it needs to be perfect xHtml. If the browse fails to work then I'm 99% sure it's not perfect (yet).

This Sounds like a challenge!  As I have the time I will play with it.  It is static so it can easily live outside the div, but I now feel compelled to determine just where my xhtml was failing.  There isn't a lot, but it should be right!  Unfortunately, xhtml is not like a second language to me - yet!

Rob

[Bruce]

Hi Rob,

the rules for xHtml are mostly simple.
a) every tag MUST be closed (ie either <tab></tag> or <tag />)
b) the html is case sensitive - so use lower case for everything
c) be VERY careful of special characters - specifically <, >, and &. these should be encoded (preferably in the #xx; format.)
d) Tags must nest correctly. ie <tag1><tag2></tag1></tag2> is not allowed.

Cheers
Bruce

[ccordes]

One more gotcha! 

besides &nbsp; you need to watch that ALL tags are closed properly!
The tags that used to not need closing like <HR> <BR> and <IMG> tags all need to be entered with the closing slash.
<HR /> <BR /> and <IMG src="stuff.jpg" />

HTH
chris c