Stop the browser "throbber of doom" while loading comet/server push iframe - ajax

When using Comet, or Ajax Long Pull techniques - an iframe is usually used. And while that iframe is waiting for the long connection to close, the browser is spinning its throbber (the progress/loading indicator).
Some websites, for example etherpad.com, managed to make it stop.
How do they do it?

After digging for a day and a night in the guts of the internets, here is what I came up with:
server-sent events - Very cool, currently works only in Opera, but may be part of HTML5 and other browsers may support it sometime. Adds a new element tag with content-type of "application/x-dom-event-stream" which allows the Server to fire events in the Client DOM. And it should not show a progress indicator, as far as I understand. It's also a working draft of a standard, and not a hack like the whole iframe comet thing.
XMLHttpRequest - in Firefox and Safari, but not in IE, it can be used for long-pull page loading that enables to handle fragments as they appear on each readyStateChange event. Will not show progress indicator*. -- see comment below
ActiveXObject("htmlfile") - can be used in IE to create a page/window that is outside of the current window scope. This makes the progress indicator go away! The loaded iframe will be in an invisible browser.
More about server-sent-events:
http://my.opera.com/WebApplications/blog/show.dml/438711
And more about the other two techniques (also explains the problem better):
* http://meteorserver.org/browser-techniques/
Even more in-depth about each technique, and more techniques:
http://cometdaily.com/2007/12/11/the-future-of-comet-part-1-comet-today/
http://cometdaily.com/2008/01/10/the-future-of-comet-part-2-html-5’s-server-sent-events/

For me, running a setTimeout on the ajax request solved everything. When I ran the request from document.ready, I got the "throbber of doom". But with setTimeout it doesn't happen. (This fix also works for Chrome).

Just in case that you may need some examples, this guy did give a solution to solve firefox problem.
http://www.shanison.com/?p=237

I had the same problem, and the solution was to use Ajax instead of hidden iframe. So instead of generating iframe somewhere in the page:
$("#chat .msg_list").prepend('<iframe id="hidden" src="chatFrame?id=$userId" frameborder="0" height="0" width="100%"></iframe>');
I used jquery ajax call to load iframe contents into some div:
$('#chat #chat_comet').load('chatFrame?id=$userId');

Related

Prevent <body> scrolling in iOS when touching iframe content

I have a question that is similar to this question here:
Prevent scrolling on HTML5 <video> element on iOS
Basically, I've used document.ontouchmove & e.preventDefault() to disable the scrolling on a page destined for the ipad/iphone. No worries, that works great and there's a bunch of fixed elements that play nicely. One of the things that is embedded in the site is the iframe-embed code from Vimeo. My problem comes from the fact that, since the iframe content comes from a different domain and is in a different document, my document.ontouchmove & e.preventDefault() script is ignored within the iframe. The default page scrolling behaviour returns when the iframe is touched, and the page starts acting weird as elements that aren't supposed to move, do.
I don't think there's any way to apply javascript from the parent page through to the contents of the iframe, but does anyone know of a way to prevent all native scrolling as a general effect? (or maybe zero-out the scrolling as it happens?)
I might have to go to a more traditional, non-ajax-y view for this particular page in my site, but that ruins the overall look-and-feel.
The site hasn't gone live yet, so I can't post the address, but I can post code snippits on request.
TIA

Loading Ajax Response Data with Adsense Codes inside

I'm 10000000% sure that this question has been asked before, however, the majority of the responses that I came across were from back in 2005, 2006 and so on. Not to mention, almost all of the questions themselves were too general. Therefore, I'm asking this so that for anyone else needs to find this out, then they won't need to dig through about 50 webpages to get an idea.
My question is simply that I have a webpage that has Google Ads embedded into the HTML of the website. The website was first developed as a static HTML site where each link reloaded a new page. Nevermind the backend technology of the website - the website itself produces purely dynamic content. The website is close to completion and now a fully-ajax listener has been added to all the links. When any of the links are clicked, JavaScript takes over, parses the link and sets that using popstate or the hashbang. The page itself is then queried to the server via AJAX and the content is updated using document.getElementByID('container').innerHTML=ajax.responseText; This way, there is almost a 100% method of accessing content that was replaced by AJAX.
This all works fine, but the responseText itself may, WILL contain Google Ads, and I was just wondering how to display them as if it were a static page. Clearly this doesn't work. Here are the options that I've come across:
Use an IFrame:
An IFrame seems to be an effective way to load the content; just stick the adsense codes a simple adsense.html iframe file and let the browser and
directly into page, it isn't possible
it's against their TOS
there is document.write() omitted in ajax request
Your chance is:
Create simple iframe
<iframe src="advert.html"></iframe>
and in advert.html, add your advert code
It's then loaded fine without problems.
Good luck

jQuery.post form submit odd bug firefox only

I've search high and low for an answer to this but unfortunately I'm stuck. The problem is only occuring in Firefox (tested IE, Chrome and Safari also - works fine, no errors of any sort). I'll detail the sequence of events to save posting all my code.
ASP.NET MVC 3 application, basic form loads into a jQuery UI dialog
Custom jQuery to hijax the form submit (serialize the form and then $.post to the server - no compiler errors when debugging and post shows up in Firebug without errors)
Http GET (automatically happens) getting the response object from the server (+ success text and XHR), response is plain HTML in this case (again, shows up in Firebug with no errors)
Custom jQuery to change the HTML of the UI dialog from it's current HTML to the response Html - this is where it fails.
I've used javascript alerts to debug the sequence of events and as soon as the post (and get) is complete, everything just... sort of stops.
As I say, only in firefox! Very odd, just wondering if there's any known bugs with ajax and firefox or anybody has heard of a similar situation?
I must also add, that on other parts of my site, this works perfectly in all browsers! The only difference between this form and the other forms that do successfully complete the function is that the response from this form is the same "page" again but updated rather than a new "page". (I use "page" as I got all this working with Javascript turned off first and for graceful degredation)
HELP! Or laugh, either is fine.
UPDATE
I have tried sending a view with a blank model back as the action result - works in every browser except firefox - firefox retains the values from the previous post! And then I got to thinking - that's a trait of firefox isn't it? And maybe that's why the original "re-direct" html response doesn't work?? I think it's time to give up and let people know they can't use Firefox for that particular function!
Ok so I'm answering my own question.
The only way I found to get round it is to use $.ajax instead of $.post and to use the option async : false
Hope this helps somebody.
Rob
Have you tried adding the attribute [OutputCache(Location = System.Web.UI.OutputCacheLocation.None)] to your Action for your GET? It sounds to me like a caching issue.

Strange problem with Google Maps and Ajax in Google Chrome and Safari

I am developing web-application using Google Maps API and ASP.NET Ajax. Here is my JavaScript-code for PageLoad:
map.openInfoWindowHtml(map.getCenter(),'Hello, <b>world</b>!');
First run is successful. But after execution some ASP.NET Ajax-function we have strange effect: In Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Opera everything is good, but in Google Chrome and Safari text with html-tags is invisible. In other words in Google Chrome we have text: “Hello, !”
I want to make the application that would normally in Google Chrome and Safari too. How can I do it?
Update:
String "Hello, <b>world</b>, <strong>world</strong>, <span style='font-weight: bold;'>World</span>, <a href='http://ya.ru'>Link</a>." transform to "Hello, , , , . " (I examined the DOM). Words really are disappearing.
I observed this strange effect on any Ajax-function with request to server.
Update2:
Many thanks to Koobz for many leading questions. They helped me a more detailed understanding of the problem.
First of all, full description of actions:
Load the page. GMap have several markers with dblclick-event in JavaScript. Dblclick event exec marker.openInfoWindowHtml(/My text/). /My text/ is located in JavaScript of my Page.
I double-click on the marker. I see a infoWindow with a normal formatting
Exec __doPostBack (starndard ASP.NET PostBack)
In server side JavaScript is updated with same
Server return some information with /My text/ to my page
I doouble-click on the marker. I see a infoWindow with a wrong formatting.
An interesting fact, which puts me in embarrassing:
I try set to “Hello, <b>world</b>, <b>test</b>”
Before Ajax function in all browser I have: “Hello, world, <b>test</b>”
After Ajax function in Google Chrome and Safari: "Hello, ,test"
After Ajax function in Mozilla, Opera and IE: “Hello, world, <b>test</b>”
What Chrome and Safari have features that may cause such behavior? Now I can write separately necessary infoWindow-text for each browser. But I would like to find a normal way to solve my problem.
Hit ctrl+shift+j to open up your chrome developer tools.
Set a breakpoint right before the function call that breaks everything.
Attempt to reproduce the bug.
After the break point hits, step through your code until the text disappears.
Set a breakpoint after the text first disappeared.
Repeat this process. Refine your breakpoints until you've narrowed down where the bug is occurring.
It could be any number of things. I have no idea what kind of Ajax things you're doing. Are you dynamically updating content on your page after doing the request? It's possible that this update code is modifying dom elements that it shouldn't be. Tracing through using the methodology above will help nail it if this is the case.
If you're using jQuery, maybe one of your selectors is out of whack and it's eating up content. Chrome is very good and I'm hesitant to believe it's a javascript bug or anything like that.
Validate your HTML. If you're traversing the dom, invalid markup might result in chrome "seeing" a different picture than other browsers. Just look for broken tags and ignore all the other things a validator complains about.
Wild guess: but the way it's stripping out HTML might point to some kind of XSS protection. Is the Ajax script that's returning the new HTML code on another domain than the one the visitor is viewing?
Some info here:
http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-dev/browse_thread/thread/d2931d7b670a1722/d56bdfccfcef677f
Do you see the problem with any html tags in the info window? As an experiment, try:
<span style="font-weight: bold;">World</span>.
I am wondering if there is a unclosed bold tag somewhere in the DOM?
I am messing around with this problem, but I haven't been able to reproduce it. Having a look at what the Ajax function does would be helpful.
Try this:
map.openInfoWindowHtml(map.getCenter(),'Hello, <strong>world</strong>!');
the strong tag is more standards compliant, worth a shot
As others have said, you need to post your code.

Iframe vs normal / ajax get request

I have a page that gathers environment status from a couple of IBM WebSphere servers using iframes similar to this:
<iframe src="http://server:9060/ibm/console/status?text=true&type=server&node=NODE&name=ServerName_server_NODE"></iframe>
and it happily prints out "Started" or "Unavailable" etc. But if I load the same url in a normal browser sometimes it works, sometimes it does not? Some of them are showing a login page, while others are simply return HTTP code 500.
So whats the difference between loading the page through an iframe vs through a browser?
I can tell you that the iframe solution works no matter which machine I am doing it on, so I do not belive it has anything to do with the user whos opening the page. And before you ask, why not keep the solution that works, well its because it takes a long time to open the page with the iframes vs a page where everything is requested through ajax.
Update: Using jQuery to perform the ajax call returns "error" and "undefined" for the servers that I can't see in a normal browser.
One difference is an iframe has to render the view while XHR would not.
An iframe is essentially the same as opening with the browser. In both cases the browsers credentials are used, so there will be no difference between the two.
Secondly, loading something in an iframe should take the same amount of time as requesting it through XHR, since in both cases the browser makes an HTTP request and waits for the response. Although I should add that an iframe will take time to render the content onto the page. However if you plan on displaying it with ajax anyways, an iframe/xhr solution will be more or less the same.
In case of ajax request same origin policy (which restricts cross domain call) comes into picture. So you can't make cross domain call using xhr. Alternative for same is embed flex swf file in your page as activex control and make flex call through javascript and then flex is responsible to make cross domain call (flex can if targeted domain allows cross domain using crossdomain.xml) and renders result using javascript again.

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