Autodesk "i-drop" content on Apache

[DanWells]

History: As an architectural firm we would like to post our standard details to an Intranet page for easy access and downloading. We use Architectural Desktop v. 3.3 as our CAD package. This is "flavor" of AutoCAD 2002. One of the enhancments that Autodesk has given us is called "i-drop" It will create the images, HTML, DWT files and XML files and display them in a framed page using javascripts.

Problem: When a user visits the site, the first time everything displays correctly. If the go back to a page it is blank until they do a refresh. I am hoping this is a easy to find configuration problem. If anyone out there has an idea of how ot solve this, I would appreciate it very much.

Dan Wells A.I.A.
MHTN Architects, Inc.
Salt Lake City, Utah

 

[RhythmAce]

Does this act the same for all browsers, Netscape and I.E.? Some pages that have their output created on-the-fly, will not be stored in the browser's cache memory. When you hit refresh or reload, it causes that script to run again. Some browsers may give you an error saying the data has expired. In this case it is usually a script related issue.

 

[DanWells]

Unfortunately we cannot test it with another browser. Autodesk wrote it so that i-drop content is viewable only in IE. Is there a browser setting that will fix this?

We have noticed that IE gives an error on revisiting an i-drop generated page. The error states that "The data necessary to complete this operation is not yet available." It lists this for three lines (32, 35 and 42) with a "Code:0" and "Char:5" in common for each error, for one of the frame documents. Inspection of the document show that those lines are in a comment. Removing those lines (the entire comment) and reloading the document does not change the erroe(s).

We can go to other sites on the Internet tha hold i-drop "objects and we do not have the same problem. If the past is any indicator Autodesk may have constructed it as an IIS only app.