DomBlog.de - Notes, Domino and Stuff

Tags: Domino Web
You are using somewhat "old-fashioned" web applications on your pre 8.5 Domino server and you've got plan's for upgrading? Well, in this case maybe you should read the whole story.

We had a challange to solve a strange behavior of the browser with a pre 8.5 application. A form contained a rich-text body field filled with text and sections. After opening this form in the Internet Explorer everything looked fine.



On the first view. Because after a click in the section, the following happened:



At first we had a look to the page source and found that:

<div id="cSec1">
<a href="javascript:_dSectionExpand('1')" onclick="return _dSectionExpand('1');"><img src="/icons/expand.gif" border="0" alt="Show details for Section1"></a><a onclick="return _dSectionExpand('1');">Section1</a>
</div>
<div id="xSec1">
<a href="javascript:_dSectionCollapse('1')" onclick="return _dSectionCollapse('1');"><img src="/icons/collapse.gif" border="0" alt="Hide details for Section1"></a><a onclick="return _dSectionCollapse('1');">Section1</a><br>Content of Section1
</div>

The href="javascript:_dSectionExpand('1')" onclick="return _dSectionExpand('1');" looks unfamiliar. So we opened the same URL with a Firefox and the error didn't show up. The source code form Firefox:

<a name="_Section1"></a>
<a href="/tltest.nsf/f75b5d47d2ee36a4c125754c003be26b/7538f3c4bbbf13cec125754c004ff0ff?OpenDocument&ExpandSection=1#_Section1" target="_self"><img height="16" width="16" src="/icons/expand.gif" border="0" alt="Show details for Section1"></a>Section1

Looks different. No div-tag, no href="javascript...." and onclick in one link-tag. But why? And why the hell opened the section a new window? The window was opened because of a "Target Frame" value of "_blank" in the form properties. And this is needed because the application works with frames. Yes I know, frames are old and unsexy but sometimes you have to deal with "former" stuff. And before 8.5 everything worked really fine. So there must be another reason.
We found that reason in the browser.cnf file in the Domino data directory which contains a section about DHTML:

## DHTMLSections - String indicating whether / how sections should render using client-side DHTML 
##
## Possible Values (case sensitive):
##		None - client-side DHTML is not used
##    Legacy - client-side DHTML generated as originally implemented on notes 6.0.  This was an
##					IE specific implementation.
##    Standard - client-side DHTML using standards-based DHTML -- will work with IE 6 and 
##					Mozilla/5 based browsers.
##
## To get the same behavior as shipped in 6.0, replace the two MSIE rules with the one
## that is commented out. 
## To extend the use of DHTML sections to other browsers, un comment the rule for the other browser.
## Note that some paragraph spacing in the Standard option may be different from the
## other options and from the Notes client.
Property DHTMLSections String None
#  Rule    Legacy    MSIE [4-9]
   Rule    Legacy    MSIE [4-5]
   Rule 	  Standard  MSIE [6-9]
#  Rule    Standard  Mozilla/5
#  Rule    Standard  Opera/7

After we've found that, our solution was really easy. We un commented one rule and commented another one,

   Rule    Legacy    MSIE [4-9]
   Rule    Legacy    MSIE [4-5]
#  Rule 	  Standard  MSIE [6-9]
#  Rule    Standard  Mozilla/5
#  Rule    Standard  Opera/7

typed tell http restart into the server's console and everything worked as expected.