[development] Re: [bug] autocomplete broken by Prototype library

[Nick Lewis]

Just wanted to throw my support in for yched's fix. I think its 
essential that Drupal fully support popular libraries like prototype. As 
is we've lost a lot of brilliant minds to frameworks like rails. From 
the standpoint of bringing in more experienced developers to work on 
drupal, offering full support of libraries like phototype is a high 
priority.

Thanks for figuring this out wched... I hadn't realized the problem had 
been prototype and autocomplete bumping heads.

-Nick Lewis
http://nicklewis.smartcampaigns.com

yched wrote:

> Issue status update for http://drupal.org/node/47557
> Post a follow up: http://drupal.org/project/comments/add/47557
>
> Project:      Drupal
> Version:      cvs
> Component:    forms system
> Category:     bug reports
> Priority:     normal
> Assigned to:  Anonymous
> Reported by:  yched
> Updated by:   yched
> Status:       patch (code needs review)
>
> Well, the issue I'm dealing with did affect Firefox (1.5/win) - I didn't
> check for IE or other browsers.
>
>
> The patch has been tested to work on both FF and IE6.
>
>
> As it is outlined in the posts you link to, we're not talking about a
> drupal bug, but rather about allowing the use of a very useful yet
> quite intrusive external lib.
>
> I'm aware that a 'won't fix' would be tempting for core devs here, Then
> again, the workaround is so simple...
>
>
>
>
> yched
>
>
>
> Previous comments:
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Thu, 02 Feb 2006 11:40:05 +0000 : yched
>
> Example : go to a node submission / edition form and type a new author
> for the node.
>
>
> According to the FireBug extension for Firefox, an error is raised on
> line 259 of autocomplete.js :
>
>
> matches[i].split is not a function
> (seen on Firefox 1.5, btw. Untested on other browsers)
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Thu, 02 Feb 2006 12:34:44 +0000 : jjeff
>
> Interesting. I will look into this.
>
>
> -Jeff
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Sun, 12 Mar 2006 20:00:16 +0000 : yched
>
> Changing title and project : In fact, the bug is not related to the s/p
> ajax module itself, but to the presence of the Prototype library
> itself.
>
>
> I'll try to use the JS debugger to see what's happening really...
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Sun, 12 Mar 2006 21:39:59 +0000 : yched
>
> Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/autocomplete.js_2.patch 
> (1010 bytes)
>
> Okay, here's what I (sort of) understood :
>
>
> Prototype adds a lot of methods (iterators, helper functions...) to a
> lot of objects (including arrays)
>
>
> A side effect is that when you walk an array with a loop like :
> for (i in myArray) {
>   aalert(i +' : '+ myArray[i]);
> }
> you first catch the "regular' elements of the array, and then you catch
> these Prototype-added methods.
>
>
> So the (simplified) code in autocomplete.js :
> for (i in matches) {
>     matches[i] = matches[i].split('|');
> }
> raises an error when it calls the (non existing) 'split' method of
> these extra elements (which are functions and not strings)
>
>
> I just replaced
> for (i in matches) {
> with
> for (i=0; i<matches.length; i++) {
>
>
> I'm no JS expert, so there might be more elegant workarounds, but this
> does the trick.
>
>
> (It seems to me that no other drupal js code is impacted, but that
> might need double-checking)
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Sun, 12 Mar 2006 21:42:46 +0000 : yched
>
> forgot to update the status
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Sun, 12 Mar 2006 22:20:25 +0000 : markus_petrux
>
> I was also a "victim" of prototype.js' method of overriding javascript
> core objects (Array in this case) with one of my phpBB MODs:
> http://forums.phpmix.org/viewtopic.php?t=1014
>
>
> As far as we saw in that topic, the problem seems to affect MSIE only
> (a browser bug maybe).
>
>
> I do not use prototype.js myself, but I believe yched's fix would
> workaround the problem.
>
>
>
>
>