text page 3 - Dave's Blog

Shortly after joining the Internet Explorer team I got a bug from a PM on a popular Microsoft web server product that I'll leave unnamed (from now on UWS). The bug said that IE was handling empty path segments incorrectly by not removing them before resolving dotted path segments. For example UWS would do the following:

A.1. http://example.com/a/b//../
A.2. http://example.com/a/b/../
A.3. http://example.com/a/

In step 1 they are given a URI with dotted path segment and an empty path segment. In step 2 they remove the empty path segment, and in step 3 they resolve the dotted path segment. Whereas, given the same initial URI, IE would do the following:

B.1. http://example.com/a/b//../
B.2. http://example.com/a/b/

IE simply resolves the dotted path segment against the empty path segment and removes them both. So, how did I resolve this bug? As "By Design" of course!

The URI RFC allows path segments of zero length and does not assign them any special meaning. So generic user agents that intend to work on the web must not treat an empty path segment any different from a path segment with some text in it. In the case above IE is doing the correct thing.

That's the case for generic user agents, however servers may decide that a URI with an empty path segment returns the same resource as a the same URI without that empty path segment. Essentially they can decide to ignore empty path segments. Both IIS and Apache work this way and thus return the same resource for the following URIs:

http://exmaple.com/foo//bar///baz
http://example.com/foo/bar/baz

The issue for UWS is that it removes empty path segments before resolving dotted path segments. It must follow normal URI procedure before applying its own additional rules for empty path segments. Not doing that means they end up violating URI equivalency rules: URIs (A.1) and (B.2) are equivalent but UWS will not return the same resource for them.

For my GeolocMock weekend project I intended to use the Bing Maps API to display a map in a WebBrowser control and allow the user to interact with that to select a location to be consumed by my application. Getting my .NET code to talk to the JavaScript in the WebBrowser control was surprisingly easy.

To have .NET execute JavaScript code you can use the InvokeScript method passing the name of the JavaScript function to execute and an object array of parameters to pass:

this.webBrowser2.Document.InvokeScript("onLocationStateChanged",
   new object[] {
      latitudeTextBoxText,
      longitudeTextBoxText,
      altitudeTextBoxText,
      uncertaintyTextBoxText
   });

The other direction, having JavaScript call into .NET is slightly more complicated but still pretty easy as far as language interop goes. The first step is to mark your assembly as ComVisible so that it can interact with JavaScript via COM. VS had already added a ComVisible declaration to my project I just had to change the value to true.

[assembly: ComVisible(true)]

Next set ObjectForScripting attribute to the object you want to expose to JavaScript.

this.webBrowser2.ObjectForScripting = this.locationState;

Now that object is exposed as window.external in JavaScript and you can call methods on it.

window.external.Set(lat, long, alt, gUncert);

However you don't seem to be able to test for the existence of methods off of it. For example the following JavaScript generates an exception for me even though I have a Set method:

if (window.external && window.external.Set) {