Overlapping Div Blanks out page

Overlapping Div Blanks out page

justStevejustSteve Posts: 49Questions: 8Answers: 1
edited January 2010 in Bug reports
I'm getting a bug report from one of my users (runs Win7 | IE8) that I can't reproduce so i can't be as specific as I'd like. Here's what i'm hearing: The top part of the page is visible as expected - this would be non-DataTables portion of the page. Somewhere very close to where the grid itself should begin some element that carries a solid white background is blanking everything else on the page. Some of the page's non-DataTables elements are cut in half - top half visible - bottom half has been whited out.

As far as troubleshooting this on his workstation....the user doesn't have FF loaded so no firebug - IE's developer tools is present though. Any instructions i can pass along that would help you better understand what's going on?

i'll send an address via your donations form that you can use to check to see if anything jumps out at you. There are a couple other jQuery plugins present on this page but the malfunction is only exhibited on pages that make use of DataTables - all other pages work as expected. My workstation (also Win7 IE8) works fine.


thx

Replies

  • allanallan Posts: 61,451Questions: 1Answers: 10,055 Site admin
    Hi justSteve,

    Very odd indeed! I've just tried it as well in IE8 (Vista) and it appears to work fine for me here. As a wild stab in the dark to start with, I've had a couple of reports recently of a bug in IE8 where by the DataTables or elements around it could be hidden from display, but would appear in the DOM.

    The issue there was with the "position: relative" style on the "datatables_wrapper" element (it's in my demo CSS files). Removing that attribute allowed the table to be displayed as expected. Given that it sounds so similar, perhaps worth giving this a go.

    If that fails, then using the IE dev tools to see if there is something on top of the table elements, or if it's just IE not displaying the page correct (which was the case that I've seen). A screenshot of the problem might also be instructive.

    Thanks also for your e-mail and donation :-) Much appreciated!

    Regards,
    Allan
  • justStevejustSteve Posts: 49Questions: 8Answers: 1
    That solved it.

    Not sure if you want to dig at this any further but let me know if you do and I'll arrange to re-bug that user's workstation. We'd probably want to arrange a GoToMeeting session to let you see first hand what's happening on his end...i'm not too adapt at diagnosing these sorts of malfunctions.
  • allanallan Posts: 61,451Questions: 1Answers: 10,055 Site admin
    Hi justSteve,

    Good to hear that did the trick! It's a very odd bug that, and I've seen it actually happening on my own browser on a different site, but was unable to get anything more useful that the guess to switch of relative positioning. That can mess up other things like FixedHeader though... So, thanks for your offer, but I don't think I'd be able to ascertain too much more than this.

    The funny thing about it was that the IE dev tools could see the elements in the display, and highlighted their positions, but parts are just completely missing. Weird! I'm going to look around on the net and see if anyone else has been encountering this.

    Regards,
    Allan
  • KepiKepi Posts: 2Questions: 0Answers: 0
    I'm encountering either this or something very similar to it.

    A handful of our users (around a dozen so far) are having the tables appear "blank" under IE. They still take up the appropriate amount of space in the rendered page, but nothing is visible; it's just white (including the controls). It's the same effect as if you set visibility: hidden; on the outermost wrapper. Unlike justSteve, though, the white doesn't overlap with any of the other page elements.

    I've remoted in to a few of the affected machines to see it for myself and while the raw table HTML is present in IE's Developer Tools, none of the additional DataTables control code is (which I suspect is due to IE just displaying what's in the DOM before DataTables did its thing? Most of my experience is with the WebKit Inspector). The users have Javascript turned on and all the other Javascript I use on the site works fine.

    The kicker is that I haven't been able to reproduce this on _any_ combination of Windows XP/Vista/7 and IE 7/8, which are pretty much all the combinations that are reporting the problem. Every machine I test on, the tables work just fine. And if the users try Firefox, no problems.

    I've been stabbing around in the dark thinking maybe some security software they have is messing with DataTables' Javascript, but I can't for the life of me figure it out.

    - Jeff
  • allanallan Posts: 61,451Questions: 1Answers: 10,055 Site admin
    Hi Jeff,

    I think you are right - there must have been an update that was deployed for IE8 which introduced this bug under certain circumstances. It's not clear if there has been another update that has fixed the issue and just grabbing the latest software would fix it or not - in part because it is proving to be so difficult to reproduce.

    Did you try removing the position:relative "trick" to see if that helped (remember they might need to clear their cache)?

    Regards,
    Allan
  • KepiKepi Posts: 2Questions: 0Answers: 0
    Hi Allan,

    I haven't yet tried the position: relative trick. I'll see if I can track down one of the people having the issues and have them try again.

    But it's not just IE8; I've seen the problem in IE7 as well.

    - Jeff
This discussion has been closed.