Today I received a mail from a friend. Some weeks ago, he tried Opera and then contacted me, reporting some problems with the Vodafone web site. I couldn't reproduce them because a personal account was needed.
Today he got back to me, reporting another site, Adecco's. This time, no login was required, so I could dedicate some time to investigate a bit more on what was happening.
The page is the following, from the Adecco italian web site:
It's just a simple form, with some SELECT controls and submit button ("Cerca…").
The problem is that using Opera the submit button does not work.
So, I fired up the javascript errors window, and I saw:
JavaScript - http://candidate.adecco.adeccoweb.com/ecit/_General/DataPages/newCandidate/candidatesearchoffers.asp?MenuSelectedLevel1=115&Selected=1
Event thread: click
Error:
name: TypeError
message: Statement on line 46: Cannot convert undefined or null to Object
Backtrace:
Line 46 of inline#2 script in http://candidate.adecco.adeccoweb.com/ecit/_General/DataPages/newCandidate/candidatesearchoffers.asp?MenuSelectedLevel1=115&Selected=1: In function multiple_TypeBusinessLines
for(x=0;x<obj.length;x++){
Line 81 of inline#2 script in http://candidate.adecco.adeccoweb.com/ecit/_General/DataPages/newCandidate/candidatesearchoffers.asp?MenuSelectedLevel1=115&Selected=1: In function cmdSearch_onclick
vTypeBusinessLineId= multiple_TypeBusinessLines().join(gCARACTER_SINGLE_SEPARATOR);
Line 1 of function script
cmdSearch_onclick();
...
stacktrace: n/a; see 'opera:config#UserPrefs|Exceptions Have Stacktrace'
Ooook. Time to learn Dragonfly a bit more… I fired up Dragonfly, and I dug my way through the innards of this site javascript files. It turned out the "interesting" bits are here (javascript ahead):
http://candidate.adecco.adeccoweb.com/ecit/_includes/jscommonbrowser.js
If you open up this file in your text editor, you will see a getObject() function:
//-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
// getObject
//-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
// Convierte una cadena con el nombre de un Objeto en la referencia
// de un objeto.
//-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
function getObject(obj) {
var theObj;
if (typeof obj == "string") {
if (oBrowser.ns6 || oBrowser.ie5) {//si es Netscape6 o Explorer 5
theObj = document.getElementById(obj);
} else {
if (oBrowser.ie4) {//si es Explorer 4
theObj = document.all[obj];
}
}
} else {
theObj = obj;
}
return theObj;
}// getObject
So, what's wrong with this function? Who wrote this probably wrote it some years ago, because it's still testing for MSIE 4.0 or 5.0, or Netscape 6. Well, no wonder it doesn't work for Opera. Maybe it doesn't work for Safari either, nor for Chrome.
Anyway, time to fix this. How? As Hallvord said on dev.opera.com, it's probably a good idea, and this script shows it, to avoid testing for browsers. Let's test the functionality instead. We need getElementById().
What about this revised version:
function getObject(obj) {
var theObj;
if (typeof obj == "string") {
if (document.getElementById)
theObj = document.getElementById(obj);
else if (document.all)
theObj = document.all[obj];
} else
theObj = obj;
return theObj;
}
I reported the problem through the Adecco web site contact form.
Let's hope that someone will consider it…