bizarre server.transfer behavior

[ChaunceyMo]

Hi all, some help would be much appreciated on this issue:

We have a fairly large asp.net app which until now has been using
response.redirect without issue to move between pages. Unfortunately,
we need to expand the application to run on Mac Internet Explorer, and
Mac IE seems to have some unresolvable problems with response.redirect.
We've started using server.transfer instead, and it seems to be
working totally fine on the Mac we're testing it on. However, when I
try it locally on my PC it exhibits very strange behavior.

I click a button on Page A that activates a server.transfer to Page B
in the same folder. I can step through the code and see that Page B is
being instantiated, and it runs through Page B's Page_Load without
issue, but after that nothing happens. The browser is still pointing
to Page A. And that's it. Even though Page B is definitely getting
invoked the actual transfer never seems to happen.

We've futzed with browser settings to no avail. Does anyone have an
idea of what might be causing this?

Thanks,
Mo

 

[Peter Rilling]

That is the way Transfer works. Transfer is entirely on the server and
therefore there is no way for the browser to update the URL because it does
not know that you changed context.

Redirect on the other hand sends a signal back to the browser and it is the
browsers job to move to the correct url, as if the user had typed the
address in themselves.

 

[ChaunceyMo]

So does something explicit need to be added in the code for Page B (the
page being transferred to) to get it to display? The odd thing in all
of this is it is only not working as expected in windows IE. In
Macintosh IE it works perfectly!

Thanks,
Jon

 

[Peter Rilling]

When you say that it is working on the Mac, are you saying that the URL
changes when you call Transfer, because that is physical not possible, on
any platform. Server.Transfer *never* informs the client of the change and
there is no setting anywhere that can change that.

There might be something else going on.

 

[ChaunceyMo]

Nevermind on this... it turns out there was a questionably necessary
"FormsAuthentication.RedirectFromLoginPage" being called just before
the server.transfer that was causing the issue. Mac seems to ignore
the call, so it actually functioned better through not working properly

 

[ChaunceyMo]

The url in the browser bar always stays static, but previous to
removing that FormsAuthentication call the content frame of the browser
wasn't changing on the PC but was changing on the Mac.