Troubleshooting

What follows is some common problems encountered and some tips for working with mapbuilder in development.

The Javascript console is your friend. 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.
Mozilla based browsers provide better debugging tools. 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.
HTML DOCTYPE declarations. 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:
```
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
```
```
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">
```
no extra whitespace in config properties don't put in extra whitespace or comments for properties in config. Properties should look like <property>value</property> and not have any carriage returns within the element.
Empty HTML tags Don't use the empty node form in the HTML page for mapbuilder elements (i.e. <div id="mbId"/>). This is because some browsers do not recognize the empty tag as being closed.
XML mime types: 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:
```
text/xml      xml xsl cml ccml
```
If you are using Apache, this file will be specified in the httpd.conf.
Browser caching of XSL stylesheets 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.
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