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Web tier: servlets, JSP, Web frameworks: Dynamic screen update options?

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  1. Dynamic screen update options? (2 messages)

    • Posted by: Chris Nappin
    • Posted on: December 15 2005 04:32 EST
    We have a complex web-based user interface that is rendered using XSLT from a J2EE application. Each screen consists of lots of HTML fields, some of which are grouped together into what we call "multi-row blocks". A new block can be added by pressing a "+" button.

    What our customers would like is that new blocks are added without the screen refreshing or changing. We used to have a JavaScript/Dynamic HTML solution that would do the complex HTML manipulation needed (insert new sections of HTML and re-name any fields in following blocks) but this was:

    - very specific to IE 6's internals (it's manipulating how IE internally represents HTML, which can be different to the output of the original XSLT transformation);

    - a couple of thousand lines of very brittle code, generally driven by regular expressions that kept breaking;

    - was unacceptably slow for large screens (more than a 20-ish blocks)

    To get around this we re-worked it to do a full server round-trip, using HTML Anchor tags to return the user to the start of the new block.

    However, Internet Explorer has a very annoying bug that it refreshes the screen, shows the top of the form, then after a couple of seconds it then "bounces" down to the anchor position.

    Does anyone know how we can get around this anchor problem? Or a better way to fix the solution, avoiding the screen refresh?

    Our customers have recommended using AJAX, but that doesn't get around the problem of making a large amount of updates to the current HTML form, so would do little to help us?

    Thanks,

      Chris Nappin.
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    Threaded Messages (2)

  2. Dynamic screen update options?[ Go to top ]

    Why do not update your screen by blocks via ajax?
    Like this for example: http://www.servletsuite.com/servlets/ajaxdivtag.htm
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  3. Dynamic screen update options?[ Go to top ]

    I'm prototyping an AJAX based solution to this at the moment.

    I have the remote call working fine, it returns the new HTML that I want to update part of the screen with. However when I actually update the screen (I'm setting the "innerHTML" property of a div in JavaScript).

    However this causes Internet Explorer to jump to the top of the screen.

    Is there any way around this?
    Reply to this Reply to original