In CMS we have a software feature that allows users to export any screen in the application as an MS Office file (Word, Excel or PowerPoint). Recently we found out this feature didn’t work very well for some Internet Explorer 6 users, so we had to tweak our implementation a bit.

The basic technique we use to create MS Office files is to take our existing HTML screens and instruct the user’s PC to open the files in MS Office. In the past, we told the PC to open the file in MS Office by setting the MIME type for the appropriate file type (e.g. application/ms-word for Microsoft Word). We found a technique that works better with IE6, HTTPS and MS Office is to set the Content-Type to application/x-download and set the Content-Disposition to attachment; filename=(filename here).

We learned of this technique by reading this article from ONJava. The article is written assuming a Java programming environment, but setting HTTP headers isn’t really specific to Java, so the basic technique should be applicable to any web environment. If you’ve been wrestling with IE6, HTTPS and MS Office, I hope this article is of some help to you.

With the wonderful implementations of AJAX, many people (myself included) tend to look first within libraries like Dojo when trying to implement a client-side solution. While this is generally a good approach, one thing that some developers tend to forget is the intrinsic events like onkeypress, onmouseout, etc.

A good example is the textarea tag. It doesn’t have any limit on the number of characters like the input tag, so it’s a great candidate for a simple JavaScript function to duplicate the maxlength functionality. The initial instinct when coding something to handle this is to check the length of the field and return a false if it’s reached the limit. This does indeed limit the size, but there’s one problem; backspace and delete trigger onkeypress. As a result, if you’re at the limit and try to delete characters, it returns false and nothing happens! Instead, I find the best solution is to truncate the field if the size is reached. For example, to limit a textarea to 255 characters:

<textarea id="maxdemo" rows="20" cols="80"
 onkeypress="maxlength(this, 255);"></textarea>
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
/**
 * Determines if a field is exceeding the maximum size
 * and truncates the string if it is over the limit.
 */
function maxlength(field, size) {
    if (field.value.length > size) {
        field.value = field.value.substring(0, size);
    }
}
// -->
</script>