Metacat

<h2>Troubleshooting</h2>

<p>

What follows is some common problems encountered and some tips for working with 

mapbuilder in development.

</p>

<ul>

  <li><span class="title">The <a href="javascript:">Javascript console</a>

is your friend.</span>  While we have attempted to trap the more common errors and

provide a meaningful error message in an alert, error messages in the

javascript console can provide additional information about where and why 

and error occurred.  

  </li>

  <li><span class="title">Mozilla based browsers provide better debugging tools.</span>

It is very difficult to diagnose problems in Internet Explorer.  

Mozilla provides some very nice developer tools through XUL extensions and

with the Venkman JavaScript debugger.

  </li>

  <li><span class="title">HTML DOCTYPE declarations.</span>

Some HTML doctype declarations cause problems using mapbuilder (including XHTML

and those that refer to "loose.dtd").

The following doctype declarations are known to work correctly:

<pre>&lt;!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"&gt;</pre>

<pre>&lt;!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN"&gt;</pre>

  </li>

  <li><span class="title">no extra whitespace in config properties</span>

  don't put in extra whitespace or comments for properties in config.

  Properties should look like <b>&lt;property&gt;value&lt;/property&gt;</b>

  and not have any carriage returns within the element.

  </li>

  <li><span class="title">Empty HTML tags</span>

  Don't use the empty node form in the HTML page for mapbuilder elements 

  (i.e. <b>&lt;div&nbsp;id="mbId"/&gt;</b>).

  This is because some browsers do not recognize the empty tag as being closed. 

  </li>

  <li><span class="title">XML mime types:</span>

    The XML documents you retrieve must have a mime type of "text/xml".

    File types that typically aren't served with that mime type include 

    context documents (.cml), collections (.ccml) and often XSL files as well (.xsl).

    Check that the mime type mapping file for your server contains a line like:

    <pre>text/xml      xml xsl cml ccml</pre>

    If you are using Apache, this file will be specified in the httpd.conf.

  </li>

  <li><span class="title">Browser caching of XSL stylesheets</span>

    Both IE and Mozilla based browsers cache stylesheets loaded by mapbuilder. 

    If you are modifying widget stylesheets, be sure to clear the browser cache 

    before reloading the page.

  </li>

  <li><span class="title">add more here</span>

  </li>

  <li><span class="title"></span>

  </li>

  <li><span class="title"></span>

  </li>

</ul>