Django/IE8 Admin Interface Weirdness

Question

Esteemed Django experts and users:

I have been using Django's admin interface for some data editing needs. I am using it on Windows Server 2008, and using django-mssql to connect to a SQL Server backend. Python 2.6.2 Django 1.1.0 final 0

As per usual w/ Django, this was fairly easy to set up, and works beautifully on Firefox, but using IE8 I intermittently get a puzzling 'Internet Explorer cannot display this webpage' when I save a record.

In the log, looks like typically on a save there's a POST request that returns a 302 status followed by a GET returning a lovely 200. This is on Firefox. On IE8 looks like sometimes POST works but GET doesn't.

So that's what I have going on. Any help w/ this will be appreciated. Thank you.

Answer 1

I realize this post is a bit old now, but I had the exact same symptoms recently. After a lot of digging around, I found that IE8 has issues accepting cookies with a life of less than 20 minutes.

In our Django project's settings.py we had the property SESSION_COOKIE_AGE set to 10 minutes. Once I bumped it to 20 minutes, IE8 had no problems logging in.

Answer 2

I suspect the bug is within IE8's refusal to process the redirect properly.

The 302 POST pushes to browser to the 200 GET, but if the browser never processes the 302 then the Django (or the server) will not log a 200 GET because the browser never opened the page (the server can only log what is accessed, ergo the browser is not making the call).

If you have Django behind something (IIS using FastCGI, or Apache, or something), bump up the logs to make sure there's no silent error in rendering. I had the same problem on Vista x64 Ultimate IE8 Beta 2, but compatibility mode appeared to fix the problem somewhat -- there was still some intermittently occurring refusal to redirect.