IE Update and ColdFusion MX 7

April 4, 2006 · 20 Comments

In light of the chatter on some ColdFusion mailing lists about the IE Update, I thought that rather than believe what I was reading, I would try it out for myself. I have Windows XP running (on Virtual PC, for testing) so I installed the IE Update per Microsoft's instructions and then started visiting some sites with Flash content. My first stop was Matt Woodward's "Flex your CF muscles" Macrochat recording. This rendered just fine in the updated Internet Explorer, playing audio and video as expected. When I moved my mouse over the movie, a tooltip appeared indicating I needed to click to activate it - while the movie played happily in the background. I clicked and then I was able to interact with the pause/play/other controls. My next site was a Flash form generated by ColdFusion 7. The form rendered just fine and, again, moving my mouse over the form showed the tooltip so I clicked and was then able to interact with the form. Interestingly, activating the "control" caused the page to scroll up so the form was centered on the page (vertically) which actually made it easier to interact with the form (half of it was below the "fold" when I first loaded the page). Finally I went to look at some Flash charts generated by ColdFusion 7. Again, the charts rendered just fine, with all the introductory animations - bar charts growing up to their necessary height, ribbons floating into place and so on. The initial mouseover showed the "click to activate" tooltip and, after clicking once, I was able to see the usual tooltips on the charts and graphs and click on hyperlinked elements within the charts. I just wanted to share that as a 'sanity check' against some of the misinformation I'm seeing out there. I'd heartily suggest that anyone has concerns about the IE Update actually try it out (on a testing server!) to find out what the real impact to your applications and users might be. For more official information, check out the Adobe Active Content Developer Center.

View count: 548

Tags: coldfusion · microsoft

20 responses so far ↓

1 João Fernandes // Apr 4, 2006 at 3:26 PM

Sean,

We are having some issues with CFDocument and Flash Paper format. Did you try that?
2 Sean Corfield // Apr 4, 2006 at 4:10 PM

I just tried cfdocument with both PDF and FlashPaper and those work fine - which I would expect since what is returned to the browser is not an HTML page at all: you either get a PDF file which Acrobat Reader handles in-browser or a FlashPaper SWF which the Flash Player handles directly in-browser. No click to activate. Do you have a public URL I can try in IE/XP with the Update?
3 João Fernandes // Apr 4, 2006 at 4:17 PM

Sorry Sean it's our local intranet.

The first case was someone testing IE 7 and till now it's the only one complaining about it and he has the update since he needs to click to activate a flash form (wich opens a poopup window with the cfdocument content).
4 Sean Corfield // Apr 4, 2006 at 4:32 PM

So if he clicks to activate the Flash form, he can then interact with the Flash form and the result of submitting the Flash form is a popup window containing the output of cfdocument? Is that correct? And what part of that flow is not working? Is IE7 blocking the popup?

Have them visit this URL and see what happens:

corfield.org/test/doc.cfm?format=flashpaper

That displays in-browser for me with no clicking required.
5 Sami Hoda // Apr 4, 2006 at 7:51 PM

Will we have to change our Flash forms which are automatically generated by CF7 to use the Javascript solution outlined in the Adobe link? Whats the solution to avoid "clicking"?
6 Sean Corfield // Apr 4, 2006 at 11:22 PM

Sami, have you actually watched users try to interact with forms on web pages? The vast majority of users already tend to click repeatedly when trying to fill in forms so they're just not going to notice the change in behavior caused by the IE Update.

As for changing the behavior of the generated forms, I suggest you ask the ColdFusion product team directly.
7 Rob Wilkerson // Apr 5, 2006 at 6:33 AM

With respect to trying it myself...I need to test with IE7 without losing IE6. I vaguely remember seeing instructions for installing IE7 independent of IE6, but haven't been able to find those instructions again <wrist slap for not bookmarking it at the time>.

Does anyone know if this can still be done and/or how?

Thanks.
8 João Fernandes // Apr 5, 2006 at 6:58 AM

Sean,

I tried your link in the computer having the update and nothing shows up. I get a script error saying access is denied.
9 Sean Corfield // Apr 5, 2006 at 7:12 AM

"access is denied"? As a JavaScript error? Can you access the link from other browsers / machines? I can access that URL from any browser on my machine, from any network location, with identical results (it works).
10 Rob Wilkerson // Apr 5, 2006 at 7:15 AM

I've seen the 'access denied' errors running XP SP2 and have often (although not always) been able to resolve them by turning off the popup blocker.
11 João Fernandes // Apr 5, 2006 at 7:41 AM

Sean it seems to be a problem in that machine since Firefox displays fine in that box. The access denied was related to the popup blocker. That box now returns invalid character but I wouldn't worry because it could be related to some toolbar-weirdo-software that he might have installed. Thanks anyway.
12 Aaron West // Apr 5, 2006 at 7:46 AM

People can also get more info on my blog as I wrote about this topic two weeks ago. My entry has information on how to fix your Flash content to work with the new update (without having to "activate" each Flash movie first) and has links to more resources regarding the "fix."

The entry can be viewed here:
www.trajiklyhip.com/blog/index.cfm/2006/3/18/Code-to-Manage-IE-Active-Content
13 Aaron West // Apr 5, 2006 at 7:46 AM

People can also get more info on my blog as I wrote about this topic two weeks ago. My entry has information on how to fix your Flash content to work with the new update (without having to "activate" each Flash movie first) and has links to more resources regarding the "fix."

The entry can be viewed here:
trajiklyhip.com/blog/index.cfm/2006/3/18/Code-to-Manage-IE-Active-Content
14 Sami Hoda // Apr 5, 2006 at 8:28 AM

We have apps with multiple flash grids to display data. Having to click each one would be a nightmare.

I will be contacting the PD Team at Adobe.

Sami
15 Sean Corfield // Apr 5, 2006 at 11:57 AM

Sami, I would expect *displaying* the data to work just fine - users would only need to click to actually interact with the grid (and they'd have to click the grid anyway to interact it with before this change - so it really may not be as big an issue as you think).

Again, I STRONGLY SUGGEST PEOPLE ACTUALLY TRY THEIR APPLICATION WITH THE UPDATED INTERNET EXPLORER BEFORE THEY START SPECULATING ON THE ACTUAL EFFECT!!
16 stephen // Aug 8, 2006 at 8:11 AM

I've come across a wee prob using <cfdocument> on IE6 where a File Download box appears to save the file as a *.cfm file.

This happens only on one machine. All the others are fine. BUT the user views other <cfdocument> as a pdf.

It's a bit of a weird one.
This is the attributes for the <cfdocument>

<cfdocument format="pdf" marginleft="0.8" marginright="0.8" margintop="0.4" marginbottom="0.4" unit="cm" >
17 leon // Feb 16, 2007 at 12:27 PM

I'm brand new to Coldfusion and was really jazzed till I ran into the same problem as mentioned in the first post. I tried your link to doc.cfm?format=flashpaper and it worked... on my desktop.

When I went back to my laptop I got:

Line: 1
Char: 1
Error: Object expected
Code:0
URL: http://corfield.org/test/doc.cfm?format=flashpaper

(format=pdf) worked fine.

I'm running XPSP2 on both machines but I noticed that IE7 on my desktop was: Version 7.0.5130.11IC
Product ID 84876-600-0179542-04253
and on my laptop:
Version: 7.0.5730.11
Product ID 84876-600-4321551-22973

Any idea what's going on?
18 Dana // May 14, 2007 at 6:26 AM

I am having problems using cfdocument flashpaper. It works on all of the mac browsers. On windows it works on firefox. But in IE7 it does not work. Can anyone tell me a work around. I could use pdf's, but flashpaper is faster. Here's my code its pretty simple.
<cfdocument format="FlashPaper">
<cfoutput><div align="left"><br><br>
<table width="712" border="0" align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tr><td height="22"> <div align="left">#form.date#</div></td></tr>
<tr><td>#form.fname# #form.lname#</td></tr>
<tr><td height="19">#form.school#</td></tr>
<tr>
</cfdocument>
I am using flash player 9, and that seems to be the problem. It works in the older players, but with IE 7 and flash player 9, they dont work. Help?????!
19 thomas kreutzer // Sep 7, 2007 at 8:37 AM

I was having an issue with flashpaper and IE only. I finally got it to work and I really do not understand why this caused it to not work. I am using Mach-ii and a report is generated and displayed to the screen, I built a function that the user can view as flashpaper and click a button. It worked in FF but not IE. On submit, I called an event that builds my flashpaper content and passes it to a view.

<event-bean name="formFields" type="dm.model.forms.drilldown" fields="userDetails,selectType,maxRecords,component,parent_name,child_name,hierarchy,liability,exportType,level" />
<notify listener="reports" method="getDrilldown" resultArg="results" />
<announce event="fpdisplay" />

<event-handler event="fpdisplay" access="private">
<view-page name="flashpaper" />
</event-handler>

The following was my view

<cfdocument format="flashpaper">
<cfoutput>#event.getArg('results')#</cfoutput>
</cfdocument>

Now I did not have a problem getting my data here, I would comment out the cfdocument tag and I always had my data IE or FF.

When I loaded the page in IE flash would load but it was blank, you could right click on the page and it would say "movie not loaded". It is working now only after changing my button from a post request to a get request. This is what I am most confused about. I am just not sure why that would make a difference here with displaying the flashpaper.
20 thomaskreutzer // Sep 7, 2007 at 8:54 AM

After a while I finally found this

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=ac2e1eab&sliceId=1

I could not find this until after I figured out what my error was. Even then it took a little digging to find this. I have never worked with flash or flashpaper in the past.

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