Insomnia, and other bits of madness (introducing the NT Wallpaper Pack)

Posted by Phil on January 21, 2009 under Uncategorized | Be the First to Comment

Last night didn’t quite go as planned. Planned was me sleeping and enjoying a full nights rest, last night however I was overtaken by a whim and couldn’t sleep until I finished. That whim is what brings this post here today, now for a limited time I am releasing my first ever NT Wallpaper Pack! This is the combined works of the NT-pixel Logo (which is old work that other people on here may recognize), and the insomniatic NT4LIFE series. So come one, come all, and beautify your background with some NT goodness (wallpapers are at 1280×1024 resolution.. which is what I have at work…).

download is in 7Zip format, if you don’t know what 7Zip is, go to sourceforge and find out.

NT Wallpaper Pack (Pixel and NT4LIFE series)

IE6 and form submit fixery

Posted by Phil on January 7, 2009 under Javascript, Web Development | Be the First to Comment

Yesterday presented a problem I was unfamiliar with, and while ie6 continues to be the bain of all web developers existance, I finally was able to emerge triumphant, with the head of the demon tucked nicely under my arm… for now. The problem of course is trying to submit a form through javascript with ie6.

After poking around the large interweb I stumbled on another site that had run into the same problem. a slightly more indepth description of the problem is that you have a form, but rather than use a submit button, you have an image wrapped in an a-tag that you have assigned a click-event too that submits the form (or sends it to some js validation, and then submits the form). This is all fine-and-dandy with any ‘modern’ web browser, but for some reason that only m$ can tell us, when ie6 follows the a-tag, it gets lost without ever submitting the form, it doesn’t even attempt to load the page.

Some people have reported that adding an empty anchor to your a-tag fixes the problem (you know, a simple >a href=’#'<), but we like code that validates, so we usually insert ye olde ‘javascript:void(null);’ into our a-tags when we handle them with onclicks, or jQuerify them.

The solution that we ended up using was to use a setTimeout(); around the form submit in the js. For some reason, this allows ie6 to remember what it was supposed to do and get it done. I like to think of it as a virtual kick in the teeth to the browser. Anyway, here is some sample code to help you visualize the problem and solution.

Here is our form, (yes, it has a smattering of JSTL in it , you can ignore that if it bothers you)

<div class="review-form-input">
	<a href="javascript:document.reviewForm.submit();">
		<img src="<c:out value="${jspStoreImgDir}" />en_US/submit.gif" alt="Submit" />
	</a>
</div>

And here is our sample javascript code BEFORE being fixed (note the jQuery goodness, that I can’t use enough of)

$(document).ready(function(){
	$(".submit a").click(function(){
		$("#reportForm").submit();
	});
});

Note that the above code works fine in Opera 9+, Safari 3+, Firefox 3+ (and most-likey but untested in Firefox 2+), and yes even the black-sheep of the browser family ie7 can render and run this code just fine.

Here is the fixed javascript…

$(document).ready(function(){
	$(".submit a").click(function(){
		setTimeout('$("#reportForm").submit();', 50);
	});
});

Yep, that’s it, a very subtle change, just inserting the setTimeout() method fixes the ie6 stupidity.