HTTP requests within Javascript on IE6

This could go in any number of other forums but it's not exactly templating / FormsPublisher, nor workflow, nor Perl - so ...

Environment[indent]TS 6.7.2 SP (unsure) and/or TS 7.2
W2K3
Windows clients with either IE6 or Firefox 3.x[/indent]Background[indent]We're calling a CGI script to do various processing steps on "finish" of a SitePublisher page (I believe the actual JSP was hacked to do this - before my involvement with this project). This script takes care of generating pages and getting them deployed to a QA server and then presents a prompt for the user to optionally publish the content to their production servers (>10) right then. A second CGI script is invoked if the user selects the option to "publish now" from the first CGI script. The second script [re-]generates .html files from .page files and kicks off a workflow (WFT) using iwwft_compile.ipl. The workflow then kicks off the actual deployment. This script is supposed to monitor a deployment log file and provide some feedback to the user at N-second intervals.[/indent]Code Background[indent]I got the code working just like I wanted to, using Firefox to help with debugging.
The second script basically just renders a bunch of HTML code. Embedded within that HTML code is a bunch of Javascript code that make calls to server-side [non-windowing] CGI scripts to (again) do the page generation and start the workflow, and then invokes another server-side [non-windowing] CGI script to monitor the log file - in a timed loop until either the deployment completes or some maximum amount of time has elapsed.[/indent]Issue[indent]The code, as written, works just fine in Firefox, but in IE6, the server-side scripts never get invoked. I used code from the w3schools as a reference for this, but it doesn't seem to help:[html]...
print qq(Content-type: text/html\n\n

...

new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");

?

Any [reasonable] suggestions welcome.

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Comments

Rick Poulin

What has worked for me before... (IE6,IE7,IE8,ff2,ff3,Safari4,Opera9)


function makeRequest(url, callbackFunc) {
  var httpRequest = false;
  if (window.XMLHttpRequest) { httpRequest = new XMLHttpRequest(); }
  else if (window.ActiveXObject) {
    try {
      httpRequest = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP");
    } catch (e) {
      try {
        httpRequest = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
      } catch (e) { }
    }
  }

  if (!httpRequest) {
    // handle not able to construct AJAX request obj
    return;
  }

  httpRequest.onreadystatechange = function () {
    if (httpRequest.readyState == 4) {
      if (httpRequest.status == 200) {
        var response = httpRequest.responseText;
        callbackFunc(response);
      } else {
        // handle HTTP error responses
      }
    } else {
      // still loading, so update display image or status message or whatever
    }
  }

  httpRequest.open('GET', url, true);
  httpRequest.setRequestHeader('Content-Type', 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset:utf-8');
  httpRequest.send(url);
}

Adam Stoller

What has worked for me before... (IE6,IE7,IE8,ff2,ff3,Safari4,Opera9)
...

Yeah, I was thinking about this a bit more (perhaps that's why I'm awake at 3am, sigh) - and decided to do a more constricted google search and found the following pages which seem to provide similar solutions:

)

Adam Stoller

Well - I managed to get it to work on IE6, only to be told that I only have to support IE7 and up :-)

So I upgraded my IE to IE7 - which has an XMLHttpRequest object, and found I needed to make one more change:

Apparently, if you don't do this, IE7 decides not to make any requests go through after the first one.The fix was essentially:var t = (new Date).getTime();url += "&t=" + t;//xmlpp is my XMLHttpRequest objectxmlpp.open("GET", url, false);xmlpp.send();...My next step, when time allows (since the code now functions I have other tasks to tackle) is to figure out if/how to properly replace the code I've written with a jQuery call. Perhaps I should have started that way, but I have a slightly better understanding of the underlying code now - which is probably better.Normally I'd close the thread at this point, but I'll leave it open in case any of you want to add a few more tidbits of information along this topic.

Chart Dynamic Background.rptdesign

oduiubo

This is my working solution:

function custom_getcallobj() {
    var obj = false;
    if(window.XMLHttpRequest && !(window.ActiveXObject)) {
        try {
            obj = new XMLHttpRequest();
        } catch(e) {
            obj = false;
        }
    } else if(window.ActiveXObject) {
        try {
            obj = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP");
        } catch(e) {
            try {
                obj = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
            } catch(e) {
                obj = false;
            }
        }
    }
    return obj;
}
/*
# url to the web service
# param is an object
# : var param = new Object();
# : param.user = IWDatacapture.getUser();
# hook is a function which must be executed when respond received
# item is optional parameter to care over variable
*/
function custom_callserver(url,param,hook,item) {
    var xmlobj = custom_getcallobj();
    if(xmlobj) {
        var message = "";
        var error = "There was a problem retrieving data from the server.";
        if (item == null) {
            xmlobj.onreadystatechange = function() {
                if (xmlobj.readyState == 4) {
                    if (xmlobj.status == 200) {
                        hook(xmlobj.responseXML);
                    } else {
                        alert(error);
                    }
                }
            }
        } else {
            xmlobj.onreadystatechange = function() {
                if (xmlobj.readyState == 4) {
                    if (xmlobj.status == 200) {
                        hook(item,xmlobj.responseXML);
                    } else {
                        alert(error);
                    }
                }
            }
        }
        for (var p in param) {
            message += p+"="+encodeURI(param)+"&";
        }
        message += (new Date).getTime();
        xmlobj.open("POST",url,true);
        xmlobj.setRequestHeader("Content-Type","application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset:utf-8");
        xmlobj.send(message);
        return true;
    } else {
        alert("Your browser does not support AJAX");
        return false;
    }
}