Ra-Ajax have for a long time struggled with Refresh and the Back and Forward buttons with FireFox and we haven't had the time to investigate really what is happening. So this have been an "open bug" in Ra-Ajax for a *long* time...
That time is
over now! :)
The fix it seems is very simple. The whole problem is that when you do a Refresh (or press the Back or Forward buttons) in FireFox then the Fox will remember the values of the form elements and fill in those instead of doing a complete refresh.
This might be handy when you for some reasons are refreshing a page and you've filled out half the form and don't want to be forced to start over again. However it creates MASSIVE problems for
ASP.NET and especially the
ViewState (__VIEWSTATE form element)
The problem is that since the ViewState is tracking the state of your controls on your page, then when you refresh your page then your Ajax Controls (an also normal postback controls for that matter) will be re-initialized as if it was a normal not-is-postback request. While the ViewState (and all other form elements for that matter) will actually keep their values and thereby going "out of sync" with the ViewState.
When you are using a rich Ajax Library like for instance
Ra-Ajax then this effectively completely shuts down the entire Ajax Engine and makes everything go into an "undefined state". And the problem isn't better by the fact that this
only happens in FireFox. Especially considering that FireFox is my personal favorite among the browsers... ;)
Anyway, there IS a fix;
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
if (Request.Browser.Browser == "Firefox")
Form.Attributes.Add("autocomplete", "off");
}
What the above line of code does is to shut OFF this feature in FireFox and thereby making the Refresh button in FireFox again work in ASP.NET.
We have (of course) completely abstracted this logic away in
Ra-Ajax and are checking to see if the Browser string is Firefox, and if it is we do this automagically. But it might be cool for other ASP.NET developers to know too I assume :)
PS!
If you're a "non-ASP.NET developer" then the fix for you would be to add up an
autocomplete attribute for your form element and set its value to
off. Kind of like this;
<form autocomplete="off"....
Ohh yeah, in case you didn't understand. This means that as of from the next release; Ra-Ajax will have support for Refresh, Back and Forward in FireFox :)
Thomas