Question

I am working with ie6 (unfortunately) and i am having a javascript error. Its wondrous error message gives me a line in the html source, but unfortunately the javascript that does run changes the code for the page(dramatically). So the error that its pointing me to is a closing div tag, not actual code.

Is there a way to view the updated code for the page so I can at least know where my code is breaking?

I should also point out what im developing in.

I am developing a sharepoint 2007 solution for an winxp and ie6 user base. I am working via remote desktop on a sandbox winserver 2008 r2 and can access the site from my terminal. Now, unfortunately in my sandbox server i have ie 8 in which my code works. So im stuck on ideas. If anyone knows how to view the updated source on the page, i would be very grateful.

Thanks.

Edit. I should also mention i dont have admin access on my terminal. So i cant install visual studio. It would take a couple weeks for an issue ticket for temp admin access to install it, and this is sort of important.

Answer 1

If you can’t install anything and the error console information isn’t meaningful, then about all you can do is start modifying your code until you can find which section is causing the error. The kinds of modifications you can do are as follows:

1. Comment out a chunk of code in a way that won’t cause more errors. If the error goes away, then you know it’s in that block of code or something that code calls. Put that block back in and then comment out a piece of it and so on until you narrow down where the problem is.
2. Start inserting alert(“1”), alert(“2”) prompts into your code with the goal of identifying which alert the error comes before and after until you’ve eventually tracked down where it is. When you rule out an area, remove the alerts to make it feasible to still run the app.
3. On a more modern computer (e.g. Vista/Win7) go to Microsoft’s site and download both Microsoft Virtual PC and the Windows image for XP with IE6. You can then actually install things into the VM and do real IE6 debugging or at least see what the actual error is.
4. Find a computer with XP/IE6 on it that you can install real debugging tools on.
5. Build your own dummy little debug window using a textarea and a couple functions that append text to it. Put that into your browser page and start sprinkling mydebug(“Entering function foo”) statements throughout your code so you can narrow down which statements occur before and after the error and eventually find the error. This is how I’ve done some IE6 debugging when it was’t worth the trouble of setting up a full-blown debug environment for IE6. This works much better than alerts for some types of problems because it doesn’t interrupt the flow of the app or require lots of user intervention and you can scroll back through the history.