I've spent many hours trying to figure out a mysterious control page behavior, without success. I wonder if someone else can spot what I'm doing wrong?

Here's some background. There are browsers connected to Indigo control pages running on several Nokia N-770 internet tablets scattered around the house. Each location shows the same control pages, except that there's one page customized for each location.

Every control page has buttons at the bottom to select other control pages such as timers, security, HVAC, etc. However, there's also a LOCAL button on each page, which goes to the control page customized for the location of each browser. Rather than make up several sets of control pages, identical except for the links associated with the page-selection buttons, I wanted to do this programatically.

With Matt's guidance, I modified the "actionType == 1015" section of _pageelem.html (see code excerpt below) to look at a "browserId" parameter in the URL and dispatch appropriately. (This is the code that creates the target URL for onClick events.) This works just as intended. If the target control page is "Local", the code changes the URL target to the name in browserId. If browserId = unknown, the template runs the original un-modified code (this should never occur, in practice). If the browserId is anything else, it's just passed on in the URL.

However, there's a strange side effect. When running the modified code, the displays for page elements showing variables mostly (but not always) do not update. I.e., if a variable value changes, its state on the web page does not change until the page is manually refreshed. When this failure happens, the spinning-gear refresh icon spins forever, indicating that the browser failed to render the whole page. Firefox's Javascipt Console says

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Error: no element found
Source File: http://localhost:8176/_getupdatedcontrols?name=Timers&changeCount=248&serverState=idle&hash=14793&_=
Line: 1, Column: 1

Revert to the original code by changing the "#if False ...#, and the pages update reliably, although, of course, my browserId modifications are no longer in place.

In the following code excerpt, "if False" skips the original code and executes my modified code. Changing that to "if True" executes the original code instead. What's really peculiar is that the "browserId == unknown" option also runs the original code. (It was carefully copied and pasted in place to make sure there were no typos.) It should work just as when "#if True". However, this is not the case. The same problem of not updating variable-referenced display items occurs when running the identical code--just in a slighty different place.

I've confirmed that "if" statements are going through the expected branches with debugging statements. So, two questions: why don't variables update reliably when using the modified code, and why does this behavior occur when the original code (which works reliably) is moved into an "if" statement, which is confirmed to be executing only the branch with the original code?

I'm not a Python person, so perhaps there's something obvious I'm doing wrong. Any ideas would be appreciated--I've been struggling with this for quite a while. Thanks.

Jeff

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#else if $pageElem.actionType == 1015
 #if False
  <!-- original code -->
  <a href="controlpage?name=${pageElem.actionLinkTarget, entityEncoding='URL'}" ${pageElem.actionLinkHrefTarget, entityEncoding='skip'}>#slurp
 #else
  <!-- modified code -->
  #if $pageElem.actionLinkTarget == "Local"
    <!-- if LOCAL button clicked, go to controlpage = browserId value -->
    <a href="controlpage?name=${browserId, entityEncoding='URL'}&browserId=${browserId, entityEncodeing='URL'}" ${pageElem.actionLinkHrefTarget, entityEncoding='skip'}>#slurp     
  #else if $browserId == "unknown"
    <!-- if no browserId parameter supplied, execute original code -->
     <a href="controlpage?name=${pageElem.actionLinkTarget, entityEncoding='URL'}" ${pageElem.actionLinkHrefTarget, entityEncoding='skip'}>#slurp
  #else
    <!-- if browserId is anything else, just pass it on in the URL -->
    <a href="controlpage?name=${pageElem.actionLinkTarget, entityEncoding='URL'}&browserId=${browserId, entityEncodeing='URL'}" ${pageElem.actionLinkHrefTarget, entityEncoding='skip'}>#slurp
  #end if
 #end if


Hi Jeff,

Try adding a test to both of your conditionals to make sure the variables are not None first:

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  #if $pageElem.actionLinkTarget and $pageElem.actionLinkTarget == "Local"

Code: Select all

  #else if $browserId and $browserId == "unknown"

I'm not positive that will help, but I think it might.

Regards,
Matt