Understanding details of problems with inter-frame references

[David M. Karr]

I've been asked to help debug a complex problem involving inter-frame
references, so I just want to understand the elements involved with
this.

Apparently, there is a page with multiple frames, where one of the
frames is a "hidden" frame, and is there just to contain one or more
"fields" that are referenced from other frames.

Supposedly, if a user "sits" somewhere in this set of pages for
several minutes and then tries to do something, the page redisplays,
but an inter-frame reference (to the "hidden" frame) fails with some
sort of a "No permission" error. If the user navigates through the
site with no real delay, they don't see this problem. This is the
situation I need to understand.

I'm assuming that the "No permission" error occurs when a frame that
was obtained from domain "foo" tries to reference a frame that was
obtained from domain "bar" (I'm not sure of the correct terms in the
context of JavaScript). Under normal operation, all of the frame
contents are obtained from the same domain (I believe).

My theory is (without much information yet) that there must be a
proxy/cache server in between. When the user navigates through the
site with no delays, all of the frames are obtained from the same
server (either the cache server or the target server, I don't know
which). However, when the user "sits" for a while, I'm guessing that
the cache server hits a content timeout, and a redisplay of the page
causes one frame to be obtained from the target server, and one from
the cache server.

Does this seem like a reasonable explanation for what we might be
seeing? What are useful strategies for fixing a problem like this?

 

[Jim Ley]

My theory is (without much information yet) that there must be a
proxy/cache server in between.

unlikely they'd be transparent, and it wouldn't explain the sitting
problem.

Just see what IE's doing and you'll soon learn what's going on,
speculating probably doesn't help much. (viewing what IE is doing is
can be easily done by watching server logs, but if that's genuinely no
good, look into modifying IE using SNUFKIN (see my site through
google) approaches to actually catch IE's navigate methods.

Jim.