Prototype, IE and Edge Rails Failures

I recently wrote a little conceptual file upload application with scaffold_resource that used the iframe remoting pattern with some baked-in AJAX goodness to minimise the amount of data returned from the server as well as making the UI a lot more snappy.

Everything went well and tested a-OK in Firefox. Unfortunately my default development platform does not support IE so I only tested the app in IE a little later. To my horror IE rendered the page differently as well as spewing the following JS error:

Line: 1629
Char: 9
Error: Invalid target element for this operation.
Code: 0
URL: <REMOVED>

Prototype goodness wherefor art thou?
A few concise questions to the Oracle of Google and I found a thread started by Rob Sanheim which detailed the same problem I was seeing.

A fix, that worked for many of the thread readers, was proposed by Andy (12 December 2005 @ 1pm) in the same thread to deal with the way in which prototype inserts content in a tbody or tr tag.

So, off I went and upgraded my app to the latest Edge Rails using:

rake rails:freeze:edge

Edge Rails will you be the end of me?

Starting my app up I got a similar nasty to this:

/Applications/Locomotive2/Bundles/standardRailsFeb2007.locobundle/i386/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:27:in `gem_original_require': no such file to load -- active_resource (MissingSourceFile) from /Applications/Locomotive2/Bundles/standardRailsFeb2007.locobundle/i386/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:27:in `require' from /Users/joelmeyer/src/FotoDir/vendor/rails/activerecord/lib/../../activesupport/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:495:in `require' from /Users/joelmeyer/src/FotoDir/vendor/rails/activerecord/lib/../../activesupport/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:342:in `new_constants_in' from /Users/joelmeyer/src/FotoDir/vendor/rails/activerecord/lib/../../activesupport/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:495:in `require' from ./config/../vendor/rails/railties/lib/initializer.rb:160:in `require_frameworks' from ./config/../vendor/rails/railties/lib/initializer.rb:160:in `each' from ./config/../vendor/rails/railties/lib/initializer.rb:160:in `require_frameworks' from ./config/../vendor/rails/railties/lib/initializer.rb:88:in `process' ... 8 levels... from /Applications/Locomotive2/Bundles/standardRailsFeb2007.locobundle/i386/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/capistrano-1.4.1/lib/capistrano/cli.rb:12:in `execute!' from /Applications/Locomotive2/Bundles/standardRailsFeb2007.locobundle/i386/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/capistrano-1.4.1/bin/cap:11 from /Applications/Locomotive2/Bundles/standardRailsFeb2007.locobundle/i386/bin/cap:16:in `load' from /Applications/Locomotive2/Bundles/standardRailsFeb2007.locobundle/i386/bin/cap:16

Seems that when you're using Edge Rails you need to use the active resource gem in tandem or you world will turn pear-shaped. Installing the gem, with dependancies did the trick:

gem install -y activeresource --source http://gems.rubyonrails.org

IE: Dark side of the moon
So, I have now upgraded to the latest prototype lib (via the Edge Rails upgrade) and got Edge Rails to run with the active_scaffold and active resources I was using in my app.

Was everything fine then and did I get to live a more fulfilling existence? NAY!

Back to the entry by Rob Sanheim and I noticed that Chris Nolan reported that the prototype lib had been fixed but that he was still experiencing the same issue.

There is a boat and I feel that Chris and I are both in it together, brothers in misery.

While debugging the issue with trusty old JS alert() he found that he was trying to insert content at an id that belonged to a table tag which was not supported. The tags supported for this were of course tbody and/or tr.

Even though the tbody tag seems to be optional according to the W3C IE still does not allow you to insert the content based on a table id.

The simple addition of the required tbody tags cured all.