Web Dev Beware - MS Javascript Holes

Monday 7th April, 2014

Just a short piece on using the web viewer in FileMaker one Windows.

The Web viewer uses the installed Microsoft browser, so on Win7 that’s IE 8, probably. Code developed for a modern browser, say on a Mac with Safari is probably more forgiving. For instance:

chart: {
  margin: 100,
  marginTop: 50,
  marginBottom: 60,
}

will be understood, no problem.

But that last trailing comma, will cause IE 8 fits. What IE 8 wants to see is:

chart: {
  margin: 100,
  marginTop: 50,
  marginBottom: 60
}

Yes, it’s correct, and fastidiousness is a fine thing in an interpreter. But it’s irritating.

Slightly less irritating, but easily overlooked, is that IE doesn’t support the object.map() function. So instead of:

clicks = myChartData.map( function(x) { return x[2]; } ) ;

you need to use jQuery, like so:

clicks = jQuery.map( myChartData, function(x) { return x[2]; } ) ;

Then it should all work just beautifully.

One finally tip (i.e. auto-reminder) is that to stop web viewer borders printing in FileMaker on Windows you need to turn interactivity off.