Blog

Scenerio: I have a simple contact form in which I want to post to a different page.
Pretty simple, just set the PostBackUrl property of the button to the page I want to post to. It works like it should locally.  When I deploy it to the server, Rackspace Cloud, it doesn’t work.

Research: After Binging for a while I found that the issue was due to a javascript error.  If you VIew Source of the page, you’ll notice that the rendered html uses javascript to perform the PostBack.

<input style=”border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px” id=”imgButton” class=”submit” onclick=”javascript:WebForm_DoPostBackWithOptions(new WebForm_PostBackOptions(&quot;imgButton&quot;, &quot;&quot;, false, &quot;&quot;, &quot;/quick-contact.aspx&quot;, false, false))” src=”/i/qcsubmit.gif” type=”image” name=”imgButton” />

I then was able to capture the javascript error in IE. *Sidenote, what is a good way to do this? I ended up putting my cursor in the form, hit enter and quickly clicked on the browser stop button. There must be a better way.

“Webform_PostbackOptions” is undefined.

Ok…. Why is that? I found this in the comments at a blog post on http://pocketnerd.blogspot.com/2008/01/webformpostbackoptions-is-undefined.html

“I was getting this error in a load balanced production environment, but once the network admin turned on sticky sessions, all the errors went away. I assume it was trying to load the .axd file from the other web server and perhaps that caused a security problem which didn’t allow the file to load. Not sure but just thought I’d share what fixed it for me. “

I don’t have server access when hosting in the Cloud.

The WebForm_PostBackOptions function should be in the WebResource.axd file that you’ll see is referenced in the html on load.

<script src=”/WebResource.axd?d=Ttwk99ZBtJ8argpvGbO64g2&amp;t=633750447951477990″ type=”text/javascript”></script>

I tried browsing to this file and this indeed was the issue, 404 Not Found.

Solution: I loaded the page locally. Viewed Source, grabbed the WebResource.axd and querystring, browsed to this file. This gave me the output of the javascript. I copied that all and placed it into a postbackfix.js file. I then referenced this js file on the page. Uploaded the new js and aspx files. Works now.

This took me a few hours of banging my head (not to Quit Riot) to figure out. Hope this helps someone else.

Filed under: asp.net,Web Development   Tags: .NET, Rackspace Cloud,
 4 Comments »