extra blank window remaining with Internet Explorer

[jwhitsett]

I have a Flex Application and am using FlashHelp for context-sensitive help. I am launching FlashHelp with the following call:

ExternalInterface.call('RH_ShowHelp(0,"/ic-help/index.htm",HH_HELP_CONTEXT,66)');

With Firefox, we don't have any problems. With Internet Explorer 6 and 7, there is an extra blank window that hides in the Windows Taskbar and never closes. The URL for the unwanted window is, "localhost/ic-help/whcsh_home.htm"

Am I doing something wrong here, or could the problem be in the way the help content author is generating the FlashHelp zip file? Is anyone else seeing this problem? Thanks...

[Guest]

Welcome to the forums. Try this:

Find whcsh_home.htm in your output files and open it in an HTML editor or text editor.

Right before the //--> near the end of the file, insert the following line:

window.setTimeout("self.close()", 5000);

Save the file and include it in your help deployment.

This line of JavaScript will close that window. This happens with only one of my projects, and I don't know why. Telling the window to close itself was the only way we found to get around it. The 5 seconds gives the scripts in the file enough time to run, and then it's okay for it to close.

Hope this helps,

Ben

[jwhitsett]

Thanks. I did something very similar, but the downside to this approach is, somebody needs to remember to do this every time new help content gets generated. I am encouraged that you have more than one project and only one of them misbehaves, and you don't know why. I'm interpreting that as, I didn't miss something glaringly obvious.

[Guest]

Or you deploy the tweaked whcsh_home.htm and then, after generating each time, delete whcsh_home.htm so when you deploy, your tweaked file is not overwritten. But you're right about the "someone having to remember" part if this is your approach.

We use Subversion for source control, so what I do (to get around a couple of problems) is generate to one folder, then publish to a second (both local). That second folder is the one under version control. The key here is that as far as RH is concerned, whcsh_home.htm didn't change, so it's not published to the second folder. Therefore, my tweaked version stays out in the repository and never gets overwritten. Don't know if this applies to your situation at all, though.