Couple of years ago I wrote about patching RichFaces 3.3.3 AJAX.js for IE9 and as the browser world has moved on, it’s now time to patch RichFaces 3.3.3 AJAX.js for Internet Explorer 11. Of course you could update your web application to JSF 2 and RichFaces 4 or PrimeFaces but it’s neither trivial nor free. The issue with RichFaces 3.3.3 still stands, development has moved to 4.x version and they’ve dropped support for the older versions although at least IE issues could be easily fixed. Fortunately patching RichFaces AJAX.js is relatively easy.
The problem with Internet Explorer 11 is that although you upgraded Sarissa Framework and patched RichFaces AJAX.js file for IE 9 it just isn’t enough anymore as IE 11 uses different User-agent string and disguises itself as “like Gecko”. The User-agent string in Win 8.1 for IE11 is “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko”. The issue is also discussed on JBoss Forums and on Stack Overflow.
The different User-agent string breakes the “rerender” after Ajax Request. For example using a4j:function in combination with “rerender” is not working on IE 11 and the problem is that after Ajax request the result XML can’t be correctly append to the body. Also the rerendering is abnormal for h:inputTextarea, rich:modalPanel, h:inputTextarea and rich:calendar.
Fortunately the fix is simple as RicFaces issue RF-13443 tells.
Patching RichFaces 3.3.3 AJAX.js for IE 11
Step 1: Do the “Upgrading Sarissa Framework and patching RichFaces AJAX.js file” steps in my Patching RichFaces 3.3.3 AJAX.js for IE9 article.
Step 2: Edit the AJAX_IE9fix.js file you just created and add IE 11 checking to Sarissa._SARISSA_IS_IE and Sarissa._SARISSA_IS_IE9. The changed lines should look like the following:
Sarissa._SARISSA_IS_IE = (document.all && window.ActiveXObject && navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase().indexOf("msie") > -1 && navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase().indexOf("opera") == -1) || (navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase().indexOf("like gecko") > -1 && navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase().indexOf("11.") > -1);
Sarissa._SARISSA_IS_IE9 = Sarissa._SARISSA_IS_IE && (parseFloat(navigator.appVersion.substring(navigator.appVersion.indexOf("MSIE")+5))) >= 9 || (navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase().indexOf("like gecko") > -1 && navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase().indexOf("11.") > -1);
If all fails you can try to tell IE 11 to emulate IE 10 with adding X-UA-Compatible meta tag to head.
The other thing I noticed with RichFaces 3.3.3 and modern browsers is that if you use ui:fragment which contains rich:suggestionbox and rerender it, the suggestionbox doesn’t work correctly. It gives an error: SCRIPT5007: Unable to get property 'parentNode' of undefined or null reference
. For now I didn’t have time to figure out the issue and just changed my page structure and function.
Although it’s 2015 using JSF 1.2 and RichFaces 3.3.3 is still working quite nicely :)
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