IIS + AIM browswer...

[joeisbatman]

IIS + AIM problem apache??

Folks, to answer this post you'll need a large amount of knowledge on the differences between APACHE, and IIS,and maybe some time on your hands to help me test my theory. Just a warning...

I'm developing a website in vbscript. Part of the site's purpose is to display a page using the AOL-INSTANT MESSAGER BROWSER. This is the part that complicates everything. When I mean it uses the AIM browser, I mean that the pages will be loaded into people's profiles. Basically, a person will have a hyperlink to my page in their profile, and it will load up INSIDE their window. Heres my problem:

I find that in AOL instant messager, some webpages do not work when an a querystring that is appended to the url has spaces in it. *Part of the website's function requires that sometimes the querystring has something like blah.hml?SN=j o e.* This part is beyond my control. I find that I get an error when I host a page using IIS and windows 2000. When I remove these spaces everything works fine.

I've tested many types of links, and links that are hosted on different websites do not always have this problem!!! I suspect that sites hosted with IIS, when
1. linked to
2. and have spaces in the querystring
3. AND are being displayed in the AIM browswer
Do not work.
I do not have access to an APACHE server, but I know of one apache server that does not have this problem. I'm desperately searching for someone who can help me better understand this problem, and maybe configure my IIS to avoid it. Else I may have to scrap months of work and rewrite my website (and all the script) in something like PHP and run it on Linux.

So is there any type of setting that would change how IIS interprets URLs? or maybe how it COMMUNICATES WITH A BROWSWER?

 

[link9]

All you need to do is encode your querystring with the javascript escape() function.

It will take out all the spaces and replace them w/ their ASCII equivalent (%20).

So if I wanted to put a querystring in for joe, I would say:

url = escape('somePage.asp?value=j o e');
location = url;


Or, if you have to do it server side:

server.urlEncode("somePage.asp?value=j o e&quot


Then, to get the spaces out, you can:

dim theValue
theValue = request.queryString("value&quot
theValue = replace(theValue,"%20"," &quot


paul

 

[joeisbatman]

Paul,

Thanks for the response! (and thanks to like ALL of the responses you've given me on my previous posts, you're always a great help)

However... the idea you had doesn't do the trick for me. Last night I did a lot more testing on it and I found that IIS cannot even "find" when the querystring has spaces and that it loads up in the AIM browser. What I'm telling you is that yes, I've already done what you said-- and if I test my page in Internet Explorer, and output the new-non-spaced-version of my querystring i end up with a correct nonspace version. The problem lies in that for some reason, getting to a page. Here is a simple test I did. Well paul do you have AOL instant messager? If so you might wanna try this yourself real fast. I went to a website (HTML ONLY page) that I knew was hosted on apache. I made a hyperlink to that page and added a querystring ?SN=J o e to that hyperlink (also target="_self" so that this page was intended to open in the aim browser). To my amazement, it worked fine! THEN... I took that same webpage and hosted it on my own IIS, and did the same thing. No dice. Since the page that I linked to had nothing to do with my querystring, it tells me that I'm not even getting TO the page. My problem isn't about processing the querystring, rather seeing the page.
I installed APache on my Win2000 machine and low and behold I can access my script. Since I don't think apache can run ASP, and since apache is just very confusing I would like to get IIS to work. Any ideas anyone?

Thanks again
Joe