Flex application bookmarking problem/"#" at end of url

Question

I work in an area where the business users heavily depend on bookmarks to access their work-related web applications. Our standard browser is Internet Explorer v6. We have a new Flex application - when you add the site to Internet Explorer Favorites, then later try to access the site with the Favorites link, we get the following error message: "internet explorer cannot open the internet site http://our url. Operation aborted". If we then bring up the properties for the link and remove the trailing "#' from the url, the link works.

What is this trailing "#", and can it be removed? Is there a way to have Internet Explorer bookmarking to work for this site (other than manually editing the bookmark)? The problem doesn't occur in Firefox (but not everyone has access to that browser).

Answer 1

The trailing # is used to provide information to your client-side framework. It was originally meant to provide the ability to link to anchor points in an HTML document. It has been "hijacked" by JavaScript frameworks to provide state information to Flash and Flex applications.

The primary benefit of using # to navigate is that the browser doesn't navigate off the current page - meaning you only need to load your framework once. Traditional URLs would force an entire page reload.

Most likely you can't remove it. You should be able to provide a means for a secondary URL scheme that encodes what you need in a query string (?foobar=1).

You will need to configure server-side processing to either redirect the user to the hash URL or load the necessary information via a JavaScript hook to your Flex framework.

You might also look into the new Google Chrome plugin for IE.

Answer 2

You can turn this off in the compiler parameters in Flex Builder. Go into the project settings, then in "Flex Compiler" uncheck the box that says "Enable integration with browser navigation".