AjaxControlToolkit HTMLEditor - Won't accept full stop keypress

Question

After utterly disbelieving our client when they claimed they couldn't type full stops (periods) into the HTML Editor control of the Ajax Control Toolkit on their ASP.net site, I've now sadly been forced to accept it is the case.

When you press the . key, and the cursor is at the final position in the editor nothing is added to the HTML Editor control at all.

If there are any characters after the cursor position, the . works normally.

If you hit return to enter a newline, and press . it works once.

This only only occurs in IE 11, older versions of it are fine, as are Chrome, Firefox and Safari. We are using the September 2013 release of Ajax Control Toolkit.

Has anyone else encountered this? Any advice would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

After doing more googling specifically around AjaxControlToolkit and IE11, I found a number of people complaining about problems with the current version of ACT (the Sept 2013 release) and IE11.

e.g. Here, here and here

It seems the problem is with .net failing to identify IE 11 as an IE browser, causing various AjaxControlToolkit features to fail.

The workaround I'm using at present is to add the X-UA-Compatible http header to our site, to force IE11 to process the page with in IE10 mode.

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=10">

There is also this .net4 hotfix from Microsoft which should fix the problem completely when applied to your web server.

Answer 2

Hope this helps someone else.

I found a similar problem with v3.0.30930 in Chrome, I tracked it down to the DesignPanelEventHandler. Specifically when conditionally dealing with deletions in various browsers when clicking the backspace button. In certain situations the code looks for a keycode of 46 or Sys.UI.Key.backspace, however in Chrome the full-stop keycode on keypress is also 46, causing all sorts of problems and finally meaning the event is stopped and the full-stop is never entered into the panel.

I overrode the DesignPanelEventHandler functionality and added the following condition in before the deletion logic and stopping the event (around about line 503 in HTMLEditor\DesignPanelEventHandler.js). As far as my tests go this seems to work fine:

if (key != String.fromCharCode(Sys.UI.Key.backspace).toLowerCase())
     break;