There are errors, damned errors and then there are the IE 80020101 errors.

Posted on by

These are the errors that follow the well laid out numerical error coding convention put in place right around the time the 2600 was the hot gaming machine. You can rest assured that somewhere in a nondescript office building someone knows the meaning of 80020101, for the seasoned programmers out there it’s almost as elusive as the hit album 0u812, remember the mystery, the assumptions, the summer of 88. If you haven’t seen it or can’t get your hands on IE8 here is what you are in for.

This error occurs in ext applications when you make an ajax request and the data that comes back is not exactly in the format that IE is looking for. In every case I have run into the code performs perfectly in Chrome and Firefox, so the development tools available in those environments will do little to help you out of this one.

As you can imagine that leaves a lot of possibilities so here are some things to look for when troubleshooting this particular error.

Are you loading external pages into your extjs panel? Not sure, take a look at your code for something like the following which is loading an external page into a panel:

Ext.getCmp('some_panel').load({
	url: '/some_external_page_with_code.cfm',
	text:'Loading...',
	scripts:true
});

In my instance, I noticed that the page in question contained a print page script that I picked from the internet that will pop up the print dialog, the code being below:

<script language=" javascript">
<!--//
  function printpage() {
  window.print();
  }
  //-->
</script>

Now I don’t know why the 

<!--//

was inserted into the script, but I do know that IE8 did not like the 

<!--//

or a coldfusion comment tag 

<!---

that was further down in the page. Once these comments were removed from the page that extjs was loading the error disappeared.

Now since this error is so generic it’s very likely that this was just luck, and there are other syntax mistakes in data that’s coming into your app via ajax calls that will throw this exception. If you run down any code that causes this in addition to comments in Ajax data returns then please post them here so there will be a central point for those looking for help.

Leave a Reply