what is this internet explorer (javascript?) syntax error -2146827286?

Question

Hi everyone,

So, I've been trying to troubleshoot this bug where some big percentage of windows users who are on my ajax (jquery) web app are not able to play. I haven't been able to reproduce it on my end with a windows 7 IE8 running in a parallels vm. The main problem seems to be in the javascript somewhere because what users are complaining about is an ajax button isn't working. They click it and nothing happens, so either the event isn't firing, or my ajax call is failing, and possibly the return from the ajax could be failing.

After trying some ideas, a friend suggested I check out damnit! https://damnit.jupiterit.com/ which will catch exceptions in javascript and email them to you. This is a pretty awesome tool! So, now i have a little more data, but, am stuck. Basically it seems like the majority of the exceptions seem to be complaining about a syntax error. I will paste the samples below.

message:
    Syntax error
number:
    -2146827286
description:
    Syntax error
Browser:
    Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; InfoPath.2; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; OfficeLiveConnector.1.3; OfficeLivePatch.0.0)

What's interesting is that the syntax error is consistently occurring in browsers reporting MSIE 8.0 but with windows vista, xp, and below, so older OS with the latest IE.

Does anyone know of this error? Could this possibly be some weird slow computer/slow internet connection thing where may be my javascript files aren't fully loaded before I call the functions. I am using the jquery $(document).ready() to wait before I setup anything.

Answer 1

Whenever you get a large negative number error like that, convert it to hex first. Using Windows calculator, select View/Scientific, copy/paste that number into the calculator, and press Hex. When you do this you get 800A03EA (just take the last 8 digits). Then, search Google for that error number and see if any of the found pages help you.

Answer 2

-2146827286 is an HRESULT exception code (more commonly seen in hex as 0x800A03EA) and would appear to be a syntax (compilation) error in your (server-side) script. You could attempt to execute the endpoint your AJAX call is executing outside the context of your client-side code to see if you can capture additional information (in your development/QA environment preferably).