function readOnly(count){ }
Starting November 20, the site will be set to read-only. On December 4, 2023,
forum discussions will move to the Trailblazer Community.
+ Start a Discussion
MarkL.ax269MarkL.ax269 

VisualForce and IE7 possible cache issue

I'm not sure if this is a cache issue, but it sure looks like something on the client side which is strange.  I have a VF page with a fairly complex layout for formatting purposes, that includes information from multiple related objects as well as two pageBlockTable tags.  It uses a custom controller to return various things.  This page allows the user to view the joined information and then "confirm" it for production.  The VF page is launched in a popup window from an scontrol page using a link like this:

window.open('/apex/orderConfirmation?scontrolCaching=1&id='+oliId+'&pid='+pid,'mywindow','width=1024,height=768,scrollbars=yes,menubar=yes,toolbar=yes');

 

The problem is, my IE7 users can run this VF page about 5 times and then the popup window will simply freeze and remain blank.  Closing IE7 and relaunching it solves the problem for another 5 times.  I'm looking at some IE7 settings but haven't solved it yet. FWIW I have run this confirmation page myself over 90 times in a row using Firefox and have not had the problem.  Do you think launching the VF page from an scontrol could cause this problem?

 

Mark

 

Best Answer chosen by Admin (Salesforce Developers) 
pabramspabrams
I'm seeing similar behavior, although with just a VF page embedded into the Lead Detail layout. It happens very infrequently, but when it does the VF page in the iframe never loads, eventually timing out in the browser with the "Internet Explorer cannot connect to webpage" message. We've also seen this going directly to a VF page without an iframe.

All Answers

MarkL.ax269MarkL.ax269
FWIW I just confirmed this on my own machine.  Using IE7 I was able to run the page 6 times and it locked up on the 7th, and was clearly getting slower and slower each time.  Using Firefox I ran it 20 times without a problem, and it remained uniformly fast, quicker than IE7.  I'm not setting the cache attribute, which should mean it defaults to "false."  I'm going to try setting it and looking at some settings in IE7 itself.  But this is definitely something to do with cache in IE7.
MarkL.ax269MarkL.ax269
Still working on it.  Once the IE7 screen locks, it will never display the VF page again.  I've tried clearing the cache, turning off the phishing filter, and a couple other settings and nothing makes a difference.  The only way to get it to display the page is to exit IE entirely and start it again, and then it's good for a few more times...as few as 5 and as many as 25 before it locks, seems to be somewhat random except that it will lock in IE every time, eventually.  I also tried specifying cache="false" in the page and that did not make a difference either.  I'm tempted to test IE8 but for other reasons I can't roll that browser out to my users, so even if it's a solution it's not a good one.
MarkL.ax269MarkL.ax269
I'm pretty sure this has something to do with the fact that the parent window of the VF page/window is an scontrol page. I downloaded IE8 and tried it there and while it eventually went blank/waiting for a response, it did throw a more verbose error at one point. This looks like it's having trouble with the parent. FWIW I've tried this on multiple networks, Windows XP, OSX running Parallels, IE7, IE8, updated browser settings consistent with Salesforce recommendations, cleared cache, disabled phishing and popup blocker, java, and just about everything else. IE will stop at some point every time. If there's one thing I don't want to do is rewrite the scontrol parent, since it's one of the core functions of our application, well proven over two years of use.

Webpage error details

User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; InfoPath.2; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; OfficeLiveConnector.1.3; OfficeLivePatch.0.0; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Timestamp: Tue, 12 May 2009 22:13:04 UTC


Message: HTML Parsing Error: Unable to modify the parent container element before the child element is closed (KB927917)
Line: 0
Char: 0
Code: 0
URI: https://c.cs2.visual.force.com/apex/orderConfirmation?id=00k60000006Zw7PAAS&pid=01t600000015nEJAAY&scontrolCaching=1

(and what happened to this forum? Now suddenly I can't get this editor window to behave, really hard to post. Worked fine yesterday.)
pabramspabrams
I'm seeing similar behavior, although with just a VF page embedded into the Lead Detail layout. It happens very infrequently, but when it does the VF page in the iframe never loads, eventually timing out in the browser with the "Internet Explorer cannot connect to webpage" message. We've also seen this going directly to a VF page without an iframe.
This was selected as the best answer
fmarkrileyfmarkriley

we are experiencing a similar behaviour. It may be associated with a temp degradation of netwrok connectivity. It affects different users on differnt netorks differently. 

 

On a personal note I have noted blank windows when trying to load lookup links as well  

pabramspabrams
We reached a similar conclusion, although we think the degradation is within the SF visual.force.com network. This is probably not an easy thing for SF to "fix", but if enough people mention the problem (by filing support cases) they might raise the priority.