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Beware of duplicate cookie values

pauliom1 Comment

Came across a strange problem today that I thought I should record since I’ve already wasted enough time investigating it. The problem was that a web site was recording a setting to a cookie each time a page was unloaded; e.g. Preference1. Any page can then read the cookie and take appropriate actions. However, for some reason the preference was not correctly read on any other page. Puzzled I examined the document.cookie property. For some strange reason the value was duplicated; e.g. Preference1=hello; Preference2=bla; Preference1=goodbye. So when the page wrote to the cookie the 2nd version changed but when the cookie was read the 1st version was taken. Once I cleared the cookies for the domain everything went back to normal. The site only has one domain, no sub-domain or anything. Very strange behaviour.

So there it is, an aide memoir for me, but if anyone can provide an explanation I would be grateful. I should mention this was all client side JavaScript.

Silverlight to resize to 100% with IE8

pauliom1 Comment

Had a frustrating time getting a Silverlight control to take up 100% height of the browser page. First off, this is nothing really to do with Silverlight and all about the div it’s contained in. In IE7 having the div at 100% worked fine, but in IE8 it was tiny. The problem is that in IE7 a div at 100% means, ‘please take up 100% of the available height’. Whereas in IE8 it’s, ‘please take up 100% of your parent’. So a structure like

html->body->div->div[100%]->Silverlight Control
means that in IE8 its height is basically nothing. So I added 100% to the parents up to body and still no joy. Then Hannah at Clear Breeze Design pointed out that I needed to apply it to the html tag too. That did the trick. So if you have a very simple layout you could do something like;

 html * {height 100%}

Even in my code that’s too simple but the basic take-away is that you need to follow the ancestors from the Silverlight control up until you hit a height, that’s the one it will take. If you want it to be 100% then must ensure that everyone on that chain is 100% too, including body and html.