Forum OpenACS Q&A: ad_return_error breaks in IE 5.0

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1: ad_return_error breaks in IE 5.0
Posted by Jonathan Ellis on 10/27/00 12:23 AM
IE "cleverly" displays all HTTP 500 pages as "unable to display
page."  Nothing else is shown.  Obviously this is Very Bad.

One workaround: change 500 in ad_return_error (in ad-
defs.tcl.preload) to 200.

(Would've posted this to the SDM but I didn't see any "tcl" category.)

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2: Response to ad_return_error breaks in IE 5.0 (response to 1)
Posted by Don Baccus on 10/27/00 12:35 AM
This is a known problem with all versions of the ACS (and any other web site that uses return code 500 the way it is meant to be used).

You can actually turn it of in MSIE and get the error message.  I forget the exact option, though...

Also, LONG error pages are correctly passed back to the user.  Apparently, MSIE assumes a long page comes from IIS and is a "correctly formatted" error page, and doesn't need to be replaced.]

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3: Response to ad_return_error breaks in IE 5.0 (response to 1)
Posted by Ben Adida on 10/27/00 06:49 AM
Don is right. We shouldn't fix this on the server because IE is
braindead in handling this error code. One supposedly new
feature of AOLserver 3.2: it detects IE and automagically
replaces 500 error codes with more IE-friendly data. Can anyone
confirm that this works? Haven't had time to try aolserver 3.2 just
yet.
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4: Response to ad_return_error breaks in IE 5.0 (response to 1)
Posted by Roberto Mello on 10/27/00 07:28 AM
My AOLserver 3.2 is outputting 302s instoad of 500s even with Netscape. To test it I changed the permissions on my bboard dir and tried to access it: 
roberto@brasileiro:~$ telnet brasileiro.net 80
Trying 129.123.236.160...
Connected to brasileiro.net.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET /bboard HTTP/1.1

HTTP/1.0 302 Found
Set-Cookie: ad_browser_id=4839; Path=/; Expires=Fri, 01-Jan-2010 01:00:00 GMT
Set-Cookie: ad_session_id=4840,0,in7Ed2Jh1NC5iZvccfOy4q9QnbyYC0dq,972624430; Path=/; Max-Age=86400
Set-Cookie: cs_browser_id=21422; Path=/; Expires=Fri, 01-Jan-2010 01:00:00 GMT
Set-Cookie: cs_session_id=21421,972624430; Path=/; Max-Age=3600
Location: http://www.brasileiro.net/bboard/
MIME-Version: 1.0
Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2000 05:27:10 GMT
Server: AOLserver/3.2
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 310
Connection: close
... 
Connection closed by foreign host.

I didn't change anything on OpenACS, so it should be outputting the error. I will to test IE tomorrow.

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5: Response to ad_return_error breaks in IE 5.0 (response to 1)
Posted by David Walker on 10/29/00 02:05 AM
roberto,

The 302 is likely being returned because you didn't send a host header in your telnet session.  If the setting (I don't recall the name of it offhand) is turned on then any request without the proper host header is redirected to the server's domain name.

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6: Response to ad_return_error breaks in IE 5.0 (response to 1)
Posted by Jonathan Ellis on 10/30/00 03:56 PM
I'm using AS 3.2, and it returned the 500s to IE.  Maybe there is an option I needed to set, but it's not default behavior.