So … that was fun.
Bug report gets filed about the application at work. It seems that there’s an error that crops up when you print from IE. The error, of course, being the characteristically unhelpful dialog of garbage that IE likes to throw at you. After a bit of digging, it got even better. I was hoping I’d be able to respond with something technically snotty, like “Do you have your printer installed?”
But, I managed to reproduce the bug. Even better, I managed to narrow down it’s occurance. It turned out that when you were logged in, the error would occur, but only if you were logged in. Now that’s strange, since we’re using application level (cookie based) authentication — IE wouldn’t know anything about your logged in state. Everything works fine in Firefox (of course, the browser with good diagnostic tools doesn’t show the problem …)
So, in stumbling around trying to find some clue as to what the problem is, I came across this … It seems that id="tags" ends up conflicting with some builtin function in IE that’s used in printing. Sure enough, we had a field with <input name="tags" id="tags" type="text"> that was wrapped inside an if logged_in? check. Renamed the field, and printing now works like it’s supposed to.
So, what could have been really long and painful was short circuited by a lucky find in my net searches. No thanks to IE, it’s non-reserved reserved fields and opaque error messages. Have I mentioned lately how much I hate IE?
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