Atlas Woes

Today was my second attempt to employ Atlas in the ASP.NET project at work. The first attempt was before my summer vacation when I tried to modify the Login page to use CascadingDropDown which is a part of the Atlas Toolkit. For a day and a half I could not get it to work, but at least I got acquainted with Atlas. I eventually figured out what the problem was and it was not Atlas-related. While filling the drpdown for the login info, I was trying calling a web service that redirected me again to the start of the login process :) No wonder I couldn't get it to work.

Today was my second battle with Atlas - again using the CascadingDropDown, but on a different page. This experiment was meant to be simpler than the previous one but it was actually harder. Unfortunately I was getting the cryptic error "Unknown Error" in IE6. I had no idea what it meant, but after some googling and numerous experiments, it revealed to be Atlas related issue (if the EnablePartialRendering is set to false, the problem does not occur).

After more googling I found this post and in the comments I noticed a few good tips how to deal with such a problem. I better copy&paste them (with a little rewording to clarify them):

1) Replace Response.Write() with this.Page.RegisterClientScriptBlock(function)
2) Put complex javascript functions in CDATA sections.
3) Check syntax of html, css, javascript
4) Remove characters that cause invalid XML output
5) Try to build pages sometimes with UpdatePanel or sometimes with web methods in aspx page with the use of atlas.js file & javascript functions to call those web method without page refresh.

I am still not able to find the exact place where the error occurs in the page, but now at least I know where I should focus. UPDATE: After spending another half a day trying to resolve the issue, there was no progress at all. We decided to postpone Atlas adoption in the project (probably until the release of an official version). I actually feel good about such course of action. Now we can spend more time on other areas of the product that will make greater difference than a few eliminated postbacks :)