flashVars empty after Internet Explorer fix

In a previous post I was writing about a fix to remove the Press Spacebar or Enter to activate or use this control message. But it also made a mess out of a flash file I was trying to use. After a lot of looking into the source code (Flex) and trying to understand what happened, I found a solution.

First of all, you will find a lot of web pages advocating using a parameter called flashVars for sending parameters to Flash applications. Then you would use Application.application.parameters to get the variables URLEncoded in flashVars. That works in most cases, but not when:
a. you used an IE fix for the annoying message
b. you have in the movie and/or src parameters an url that has parameters. (like when you would get the SWF file out from an HttpHandler, for example)

The solution is to put all the variables you would put in the flashVars in the url of the movie or src parameters.

So, instead of :
<param name='movie' value='test.swf' />
<param name='flashVars' value='a=%27test%27&b=12' />

use
<param name='movie' value='test.swf?a=%27test%27&b=12' />

Don't forget to UrlEncode the values.

But why does this happen? Apparently, the problem is that after setting the innerHTML property the FlashVars param element has an empty value. I tried to fix the javascript to 1. get the value of FlashVars 2. do the fix 3. replace the empty FlashVars value with the saved value. It did not work! Even by javascript, after finding the param element with the name of FlashVars and an empty value, I could not set the value of the element. It probably has to do with the IE "fix". Something must clear the FlashVars when being set from anything else but from source.

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Getting rid of the annoying Press Spacebar or Enter to activate and use this control message

Ok, the why is something I could never truly understand. It's some lawyer thing. But the fact remains that Microsoft was legally bound to show that message on each ActiveX control in Internet Explorer, thus screwing everybody and all their Flash pages.

When you Google this you find a miriad solutions. Some of them rewrite the entire HTML, others just take all the objects and embeds and rewrite their innerHTML or their outerHtml. But sometimes, it just seems that none of them work. And here is the catch for all of them: in order to work, the function that does the replacing of the HTML must be in an external Javascript file. Yes, you read right, if the function is inside the page, it doesn't work. Weird, huh?

Anyway, here is the script I use. It works, apparently.

function fixFlash() {
//ediy v2
n=navigator.userAgent;
w=n.indexOf("MSIE");
if((w>0)&&(parseInt(n.charAt(w+5))>5)){
T=["object","embed","applet"];
for(j=0;j<2;j++){
E=document.getElementsByTagName(T[j]);
for(i=0;i<E.length;i++){
P=E[i].parentNode;
H=P.innerHTML;
P.removeChild(E[i]);
P.innerHTML=H;
}}}
}

For more information about other solutions and the legal issue between Microsoft and Eolas read this specialised blog: IE ActiveX Change "Click to activate and use this control"

Update:
Well, I noticed that the Flash file I wanted to use stopped working after using this fix. Luckily I had the source and so I found a fix. The next post details it.

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WebResource.axd or how I learned to love the embedded resource

It all started with my own library, a dll in which I wanted to include Javascript, CSS and ultimately images or flash files. I did it the only way I could in 1.1, mainly adding the resources to the project, setting them as Embedded Resource, then reading them and either put them in the page or write them in the application directory and link them in the page. As you can imagine, there were a lot of issues related to writing writes and so on.

But then .NET 2.0 and the AjaxControlToolkit arrived. This toolkit had this funny looking Tab thing, and it used images. So where did it get the images? I was surprised to see that the namespace of the TabContainer control was decorated with stuff like this:

[assembly: WebResource("AjaxControlToolkit.Tabs.tab.gif", "image/gif")]

then in the CSS files, stuff like

background-image:url(<%=WebResource("AjaxControlToolkit.Tabs.tab.gif")%>)

Could it be so easy? yes! And for the js files, they had this class called a ScriptControlBase and the only thing you needed to do to insert a javascript file was decorate the implementing class like this:

[ClientScriptResource("AjaxControlToolkit.TabPanel", "AjaxControlToolkit.Tabs.Tabs.js")]

But what was the underlying mechanism? Googling for WebResource.axd you get these informative links:
Using WebResource.axd for embedded resources
Accessing Embedded Resources through a URL using WebResource.axd

Working with Web Resources in ASP.NET 2.0

These three articles pretty much explain the basics, so I won't do anything but emphasize the more important points:

• When you use the name of the resource, either when decorating the namespace or when getting the reference to it, use the project namespace and the folder in which the file is in, otherwise it will not work. So if you have the namespace MyControls.Web and you have the folder Images in which you embedded an Image.gif file, the name should be MyControls.Web.Images.Image.gif.
• To programatically get the url for an embedded resource use Page.ClientScript.GetWebResourceUrl(Type type,string resourceName)
• In order to get the contents of an embedded resource use code like this:

  Assembly assembly = GetType().Assembly;
  arr = assembly.GetManifestResourceNames();
  foreach (string name in arr)
  if (name==resourceName) {
  Stream s = assembly.GetManifestResourceStream(name);
  // do something with the stream
  break;
  }

But what is this WebResource.axd? It's an IHttpHandler, one that you can also implement quite easily. They are used to handle Ajax, file uploads, get access to all kinds of resources. Look it up. Somewhere in the near future I might write an article about these, too.

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Saving Internet Explorer and FireFox tabs

It happened to everyone: you opened a bunch of sites and you have to go or restart your computer or something like that. You would like to save those tabs for later reference. Well, Internet Explorer does have something built in to take care of this, but it's kind of stupid. A third party software would be far better.

But anyway, you are in a hurry, you want a quick solution and I have two for you:
1. Make sure you have set Warn me when closing multiple tags in Internet Options, then close your browser. It will ask you if you want to close all tabs, click on Show Options, check Open these next time I use Internet Explorer.

2. Go to Internet Options and then just click Use current in the Home page section. It will set all your open sites as home pages.

In Firefox things are far better. Just right click on the tabs bar and bookmark all. It will ask you to save them with a name. Then just go to the Bookmarks menu and reload them.

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Sarah Bettens from K's Choice

I remembered today of a song that I liked to listen to called Everything for Free, by K's Choice. Back then (oh, my tired bones) the Internet was not yet as... evolved as these days and you couldn't really get all the discography of an artist in a few minutes, so I only listened to this one song that was also on MTV.

I am putting the video clip here, but really do look into the singer, Sarah Bettens, who also has a solo project beyond K's Choice and has a lot of videos on YouTube. Here are some sites you can visit:

	K's Choice	Sarah Bettens
Official Site	X	X
Myspace Site	X	X
Wikipedia Site	X	X

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Absolute position of html elements in Javascript

Update: in IE7 I noticed that the style property doesn't keep the inherited values or the CSS values, but only the inline values of style. 'currentStyle' keeps all values, therefore I used that too, in case style would not work.

Update: the same can be done in FireFox by using the document.defaultView.getComputedStyle(myObject, null) syntax equivalent to myObject.currentStyle in Internet Explorer. I have not updated my function to work with that, though.

Update: By adding a break in case of relative or absolute positioning I seemed to have fixed most of the issues regarding those types of positioned elements.

Whenever one wants to popup something with Javascript, the bigger problem arising is to find the absolute position of the element that you want the popup to cling to. Searching the web you will probably find a site like this: How to get an element’s position and area, you will try that solution and say "Wee! It works!" until you scroll something inside the page and everything turns to mush.

Analysing the code and the html you will see that it ignores completely the scrolling of various elements. Even worse, the offsetParent is one for Internet Explorer and another for FireFox. So here is my solution, which seems to work in most cases. I will work on it some more, but not in the near future and usually one doesn't need a popup in a popup. So here is the code:

function findPos(obj)
{
 var curleft = 0;
 var curtop = 0;
 if (obj.offsetParent)
 {
  while (obj.offsetParent)
  {
   curleft += obj.offsetLeft-obj.scrollLeft;
   curtop += obj.offsetTop-obj.scrollTop;
   var position='';
   if (obj.style&&obj.style.position)
      position=obj.style.position.toLowerCase();
   if (!position)
       if (obj.currentStyle && obj.currentStyle.position)
           position = obj.currentStyle.position.toLowerCase();
   if ((position=='absolute')||(position=='relative')) break;
   while (obj.parentNode!=obj.offsetParent) {
    obj=obj.parentNode;
    curleft -= obj.scrollLeft;
    curtop -= obj.scrollTop;
   }
   obj = obj.offsetParent;
  }
 }
 else {
     if (obj.x)
      curleft += obj.x;
  if (obj.y)
      curtop += obj.y;
    }
 return {left:curleft,top:curtop};
}

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Poe - Not a Virgin Anymore

This song is one of my latest favourites, even if the sound itself is a bit too much like country music, the lyrics are really funny. I wasn't able to find the video for the song, so here is a random video one.



Poe, by her real name Ann Danielewski is the daughter of the Polish director Tad Danielewski and is singing since 1990. Look for her other songs as well, some are really smart and they sound pretty cool.

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