The Codebelay Blog

Tag: ajax

  • Redboxing with Rails: Modal Windows FTW

    There’s a great lightbox plugin for Ruby on Rails called Redbox. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work out of the box, but here’s the patch for redbox.js:

    Replace:

    Element.setTop(window_id, boxTop);
    Element.setLeft(window_id, boxLeft);

    With:

    $(window_id).style.top = boxTop + “px”;
    $(window_id).style.left = boxLeft + “px”;

    Remove or comment out:

    Element.hide(‘RB_loading’);

    Remove:

    <div id=”RB_loading”></div>

  • The HTTP Status 122 Error in IE7 in Ajax Apps

    Summary: Don’t use the GET method in Ajax Apps, if you can void it, because IE7 craps out with more than 2032 characters in a get string.

    Here’s the page that craps out at 2033 characters with IE7:
    http://www.codebelay.com/status122/?i_limit=2033

    You won’t see the error with other browsers.

    Here’s the page that’s okay:
    http://www.codebelay.com/status122/?i_limit=2000

    What’s going on here?

    picture of http status 122
    Sometimes you’ll write a piece of Javascript that uses prototype and looks like this:

      var url = '/status122/listener/?stuff=' + encodeURIComponent($('js_stuff').innerHTML);

  // This is where we send our raw ratings for parsing
  var ajax = new Ajax.Updater(
	 'jskitdecoded',
	 url,
	 {
		method: 'get',
		onComplete: showResponse
	 }
  );

    If you print http.status you get an HTTP Status of 122. WTF?

    What’s going on here is that IE7 sets a limit of 2032 characters on GET strings, so you have to do a POST instead like so:

      var getvar = encodeURIComponent($('js_stuff').innerHTML);
  var url = '/status122/listener/';

  // This is where we send our raw data for parsing
  // If we use method: 'get', IE7 will return a 122, but
  // b/c Firefox is RFC2616 compliant and realizes that
  // there is no minimum length for a URI, we get success.
  // Here we use method: 'post' b/c IE7 is lame.
  var ajax = new Ajax.Updater(
	 'jskitdecoded',
	 url,
	 {
		method: 'post',
		postBody: 'stuff=' + getvar,
		onComplete: showResponse
	 }
  );

    I hope this helps.

    What Ajax quirks have you run into?