Written by: Dylan Barber
3/30/2009 12:24 PM 

Imagine our surprise when we first started deploying reports some 8 months ago in DotNetNuke and we could never see a ‘spinny’ for any of our reports. Sure when we developed them and did the preview we would get one and when we deployed them on pages outside of DNN we saw it but we could never figure out why, in DNN, it would never show. Until IE8 came out, that is.

IE8 has a wonderful little feature called Compatibility Mode and combined with Fiddler (http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2/) we were able to notice that the spinner appeared when the site was switched from Compatibility mode and back to regular but not when the page first loaded.  Forcing the site to load everything again with Alt + F5 seemed to make the spinner appear as well. Watching fiddler while doing this we saw a few things happen. JavaScript files appeared to be reloaded and CSS files appeared to be reloaded. This made us think that maybe some little bit of bad JS or some malformed CSS was causing the ‘spinny’ to not show. So we stripped out or moved all the CSS and Java Script for the site into the module that loaded the report. No luck! No ‘spinny’!

Further investigation with a clean DNN install forced us to strip the default.aspx page down to almost nothing in the way of code until it became evident that it wasn’t code causing it but some meta tag, after all that was all that was left after we ditched everything else in the page. One by one we stripped out the meta tags until success, we removed the ‘PAGE-ENTER’ meta tag, and ‘Hello Mr. Spinny!’.

Removing the <meta http-equiv=”PAGE-ENTER” content=”RevealTrans(Duration=0,Transition=1)” /> tag causes some pages to render and then ‘adjust’ themselves as CSS is applied and I imagine this is why the tag was introduced in the first place, to remove this pseudo flash of un-styled content, not to be confused with FOUC (http://bluerobot.com/web/css/fouc.asp/).  I can’t imagine other places this may have caused problems with dynamic effects, generated content, or JavaScript but it is at least one place to look if you are having some problems.

I must say that the tenacity for hunting this bug has to go to my coworker Lyle – he doesn’t like to blab on like me but he has blogged about this on his blog at http://zacuke.com/index.php/2009/03/dnn-meta-tag-fun/.

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Location: Blogs Pants Optional! DNN (Dotnetnuke) / ASP.NET

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