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General discussion

How to adapt site developed in ASP & SQLServer for IE7?

Jun 27, 2007 5:59PM PDT

My company's website has worked fine on IE6 using W2000. I've just installed Vista Business with IE7 and have discovered several problems. The site was only tested on IE6 and I was aware that it didn't work properly on browsers like Firefox, but didn't have the budget time or expertise to adapt it! It's a 20 page site in two language versions. It was developed in ASP and works with an MS SQL2000 database. I use an Access interface to access data, add comments & update menus etc. The menus when pulled up using an IE7 browser no longer display as when using IE6. In some cases they cut off at the first word eg United instead of United States. In others they don't display the menu selections at all but the category I'd classed these selections in, which shouldn't appear at all! Also I seem to have a problem with caching whereby the usertype isn't recognised. This problem seems to go away once the cache has been cleared.
Does this mean I'll need all my code reviewing to ensure it conforms to IE7 standards, or are there some obvious fixes that are already documented? Does Microsoft provide any practical help? If I'll need to hire a developer for this, is it likely to be a big job what should I expect to pay for such adaptation? I'm only a very small business but dependant upon this website.
Your advice would be much appreciated.

Discussion is locked

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Re: incompatibilities
Jun 27, 2007 6:18PM PDT

This is a very annoying problem indeed.

The ASP-program running on your server produces a webpage with html and possibly javascript code, and that's interpreted by the browser. Browsers can't do much more than that (interpreting html and javascript), except calling addons like flash and mediaplayer and java for all those things they can't do themselves.

Obviously, the html/javascript-code produced by the ASP-code produced by the guy who wrote your current site wasn't kosher. There are difference between IE6 and Firefox and Opera and Safari, and a reasonable requirement for any implementation is that it works on all of these. Details of how it looks might be different, but it should work without errors and look good enough to be presentable. You shouldn't have accepted it back then in the first place as long as it misbehaved on Firefox.

All you can do now is to find out what doesn't work, why it doesn't work and correct it. And you will need somebody (maybe yourself, maybe a professinal developer) with enough knowledge of html, javascript and asp to do it. There should be no need to change the backend (that is, the Access database and the SQL-database). Just the details in the html produced.
It's impossible to say how long this takes before doing it.

Hope this helps.


Kees

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How to adapt site developed in ASP & SQLServer for IE7?
Jun 27, 2007 7:38PM PDT

Hi Kees
Can you recommend somebody reliable and not too expensive who could make the necessary adjustments to the code (assuming this is allowed via the forum)?
Thanks
Marilyn

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Sorry, no.
Jun 27, 2007 7:49PM PDT

I live and work in Holland (that's the other side of the world for you) and even if I know somebody with the right expertise and time, I wouldn't recommend somebody so far away from you.
I know that this can easily be done via Internet, but somehow it's often better to have some face-to-face contact once in a while.

Hope you find a fast and good solution.

Kees

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How to adapt site developed in ASP & SQLServer for IE7?
Jul 1, 2007 9:41PM PDT

Hi
Sorry for not having acknowledged your reply sooner. Actually I'm not so far away from you (France) and have worked at a distance with people before (it's not ideal but it's often better to have the right person even if remote). I have since put the project onto a site for sourcing external development. This has worked out for debugging in the past but I'm always nervous about allowing access to my code before the project has been properly allocated. One "bidder" has requested the source code for the pages and access to the database in order to be able to ascertain the problem and quote properly. Providing copies of the web & script pages seems reasonable (without permissions to upload anything via FTP) but not access to the database at this stage, even though the problem may lie in the SQL code. Do you think it's a reasonable request or should someone be able to quote without accessing the db? Is it possible to show the structure without giving direct access? If I can't get around allowing access to the SQL, are there precautions I should take?

Many thanks for your help

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Re: choosing a developer
Jul 2, 2007 5:17AM PDT

Any programmer will have to have access to the code to be able to estimate the amount of work to do. Nothing you can do about that.

And it quite understandable he needs the 'schema' of the database (that is the SQL create table code, or equivalent documentation). I don't know about SQL Server, but it's clumsy to make that in MS Access (a lot of screenprints from the table design view, or a lot of VBA code to list it).

All in all, I think it's a reasonable request. Sooner or later, you'll have to trust him.

Kees

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Re: choosing a developer
Jul 2, 2007 7:31AM PDT

Interesting! I'd have thought one needed to have a confidentiality agreement and be assigned the work before having unlimited access to the structure & content of a company's database. Otherwise how can I respect my data protection responsibility to my users?
Best

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It's up to you ...
Jul 2, 2007 10:01PM PDT

to decide what to do. Any developer will surely agree to non-disclosure and confidentiality if you give him access to the database for this purpose.
If you only give him documentation or a print of the database structure, there's no risk of him seeing any data, and that's preferable. But if you can't do that, you'll have to take precautions.

Depending on the structure of the database, it's conceivable you only need to grant him access (can be done via SQL server) to a few content or function related tables (like those that define a menu) and not to tables with customer data.

Best of luck,


Kees

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Choosing a developer
Jul 2, 2007 10:37PM PDT

Kees
Many thanks for all your advice! I'm not familiar with how to grant permissions to certain tables/functions in SQL but I'll ask the host of the site. I was surprised that the developer should ask for access to the db because I thought it wasn't likely to be a backoffice issue, more an HTML, Javascript one.
Anyway, it's nice of you to reply to all my dumb questions!