“please wait while scripts are loaded…”

I really need to write this… I spent, wasted more than one full day just to sort this small thing…

We implement our corporate page template into a MOSS masterpage.
Copy and paste the html code. Try it first with a blank page layout, not even the page content area. Fine. Looks good and easy.

Add the page content field to the center of layout, to start with.
This time, after creating a content page based on the layout, we type in some text into the page content area at the center.
Do the Preview from the Tools menu. The text I typed DISAPPEAR!! Try to save without previewing. The same. The text is gone… From here, my long debugging exercise started.

It is fine without our page template, the HTML code pasted into the masterpage.
With the template, I noticed that when change the page to edit mode, the status bar of the browser reads “please wait while scripts are loaded…”
Looks something going wrong with javascript codes generated.

A Sharepoint generated page contains tens of thousand lines of javascript. You need a debugger like FireBug to debug this.
We need to either 1 authenticate FireFox against Sharepoint or 2 find a good javascript debugger for IE. Luckily I found the later.

Thanks god! The debugger found the line causing the error. It was in a js file called /_layout/1033/HtmlEditor.js, at its line 5772.

var displayContentElement=document.getElementById(clientId+"_displayContent");
…
var findForm=displayContentElement;
while (findForm.tagName!="FORM" && findForm.tagName!="WINDOW")
{
findForm=findForm.parentElement;
}
findForm.attachEvent("onsubmit",new Function("RTE2_TransferContentsToTextArea('"+clientId+"');"));

At run time, the clientId+"_displayContent” is the id of <div> element for the page content textarea. This code adds an event handler for the form submission, to save the text typed. However, with our page template pasted, the findForm.parentElement does not return. It can not find the <form id=”aspnetForm”> element to add the event handler. Why?

I had the impression that it is probably the <form> element for the search box that we have with the page template, though it does not really make sense because it is properly closed, should not interfere others.
But it was it. Having removed it, my simple page with our corporate page template now works. We think about how to have the search box back later.


To me, the lesson here is that, if you are not lucky and trapped with a problem such as this, it is really difficult to debug it with Sharepoint MOSS.