At SSP Innovations, we perform upgrades for our clients very frequently and through the course of these efforts, we often struggle to get beyond different issues that arise.

These issues often seem to be very trivial in nature…only after we have figured out the solution.

Those issues has prompted us to publish a blog series entitled ArcGIS / ArcFM™ Upgrade Tips.

In this series, we will be sharing upgrade tips that will hopefully save our readers a lot of time and heartache.

The paragraphs below are the first installment in the series, and were written by one of SSP Innovations’ newest employees, Chris Wittenberg.

When upgrading or otherwise updating legacy web applications, browser compatibility is a concept that is easy to overlook and can be quite costly to do so.

A good symptom of this is if the code in question seems to work fine in the debugger and throws no errors, but content in iFrames or pop-up windows fail to load despite their routines firing normally.

To save you many hours of fruitless debugging, the issue might be that your web application is not compatible with the version of IE you are trying to run it on.

Enter IE compatibility mode. In versions 5 and 6, Microsoft saw that version compatibility was a huge issue and added a new feature call “Compatibility Mode” into IE 8 and all versions of IE since.

What IE compatibility mode does is that regardless of the version of IE browser you use, it “forces” the browser to run the web application as if it were a different version; chiefly, the one that your site originally built for.

Individual users of web applications can set their IE browser to use compatibility mode, but it can be sometimes difficult to find and the users shouldn’t be required to figure it out on their own.

Web developers can turn on IE compatibility mode by adding the following snippet of code into the configuration section of your application’s Web.config file:

<system.webServer>

      <httpProtocol>

         <customHeaders>

            <add name=”X-UA-Compatible” value=”IE=7″ />

         </customHeaders>

      </httpProtocol>

   </system.webServer>

When your application reads the Web.config file, it will read the name “X-UA-Compatible” which tells the browser to activate compatibility mode, and the value sets the browser to run the web application as if were IE 7 regardless of what version it actually is. This is incredibly useful if your app was built to run on IE 7, but users of your app will probably be using IE 11. Just set the value to be whatever version of IE your web application was originally written for, and you should be good to go.

Keep your eye out for future installments of the ArcGIS / ArcFM™ Upgrade Tips series.

Did this tip help you like it helped us?  Let us know in the comments below.  If you have a tip of your own, please feel free to share.