IE, Flash, Xml/LoadVars, and GZip
Can’t we all just get along?
It seems that Flash and Internet Explorer have some communication issues. Namely, when a server returns GZipped data to IE for consumption in Flash, Flash don’t get no sugah.
Rather, Flash never gets the data. Which is messed up.
See this quote on the LoadVars page on LiveDocs (it’s buried in the comments, so I’m quoting it in full here to save you the time - I haven’t seen a response from MM/Adobe on the issue):
drusunlimited said on Jun 16, 2005 at 7:18 AM:
I have found a bug in Internet Explorer that affect flash: when a query is done to a server an the server response in content enconding:gzip, the explorer don´t communicate with the flash activex.
I finally found a solution, changing the server settings in order of don´t use this content encoding mode. But the problem exists.
Good luck.
In all likelihood, this is an IE issue, not Flash, as Firefox has no such issues (of course, it’s a different player, one a ‘plugin’, one an active-x control, but I’ll give MM the benefit of the doubt).
Anyone else out there encounter this? And, please tell me so, a method of dealing with it that doesn’t involve turning off compression on the server?
deni wrote:
Hey,
I’ve been having the same problem as you, I’ve been trying to import an xml (created by a server) into flash but my return is always 3 square boxes. The xml is access though and http address and is gzip encoded. I was wondering if you found a solution to your problem so maybe I could use it to solve mine.
Thanks
deni
Posted on 11-Apr-06 at 1:36 pm | Permalink
jason wrote:
Hey Deni,
My solution was to turn off gzip for the time being.
Posted on 17-Apr-06 at 10:06 am | Permalink
dirtystylus » Blog Archive » Internet Exploder wrote:
[…] 2) When the server response is compressed using gzip. This seems to affect both LoadVars and XML load requests - the request gets made, and the server returns the data, but for some reason the compression scheme prevents the data from being delivered to the ActiveX component. See this for the rundown. This problem seems to be behind a particularly confusing bug with an old Starwood site I developed a few years ago - a piece of functionality using LoadVars just stopped working, but only in IE. Apparently the server compression settings were the culprit. […]
Posted on 31-May-06 at 10:15 am | Permalink
AllixHD wrote:
We had the problem and have solved it by building a javascript intercession library…
Can’t be arsed to post code, but look at http://uk.playstation.com/pdcf/index.jhtml (grab scripts and decompile flash) for ideas about how to use it.
Posted on 16-Aug-06 at 9:44 am | Permalink
Dave wrote:
Encountered similar problem. XmlHttpRequest would receive compressed xml data from the server, with a 200 return code, but would not have any data. Worked great in Firefox. Server was deflating the xml prior to sending it. Had to turn off compression on the server (nusoap).
Posted on 08-Mar-07 at 4:19 pm | Permalink
Jeremy wrote:
I am having this same issue. I’ve been working on it for 2 days and the only thing that works is to disable http 1.1 in IE. This is however not an acceptable solution. When you say you disabled compression did you change your web server or is there a way to do this in the nusoap service? please let me know if you hae found any new information since this posting.
Posted on 22-Jan-09 at 5:37 pm | Permalink
jason wrote:
as usual, better late than never. no, we had to disable compression in IIS…
Posted on 07-Apr-09 at 3:55 pm | Permalink