Best practice forum (Archived)

TinyMCE and modal dialogues work inconsistently on Totara 2.6 on IE8

Hi,

We have discovered that the TinyMCE editor no longer seems to appears for Text Entry fields within the Appraisal section of Totara when viewed on IE8. It also doesn't appear on the Primary Position screen for a user, but does appear on the screen for entering the name and description of an appraisal and other places which are generic Moodle. I have also noticed that Save PDF Snapshot and Print no longer do anything when pressed in the Appraisal screen, which may well be linked to the fact that nothing which requires one of the Totara modal dialogues (assigning a new manager to a user, etc.) appears to work. The Activity Chooser and File Picker work fine, as expected.

I appreciate that IE8 is no longer a fully supported browser for Moodle 2.6, but this seems a lot like a regression and for us since the features worked perfectly well in 2.5 and none of the dialogues (on the surface at least), appear to have changed. I suspect this is also going to be a problem for other NHS Trusts since IE8 is mandated for our national HR system, and upgrading to IE9+ or switching to another browser just isn’t an option. The fact that TinyMCE works fine elsewhere (in the non-Totara Specific areas it seems) would appear to suggest that something isn't quite right here which isn’t entirely based on Moodle no longer supporting IE8 officially. Most of the modal dialogues are only really used by our admin staff (reassigning staff to new managers, etc.) and therefore we can look at a limited rollout of a different browser, but that isn’t possible for most of the organisation and the PDF Snapshot and Print in Appraisals needs to work for everyone.

I know that this is a good example of why it’s important to do lots of testing prior to upgrading, but I thought it was important to ask if/when this will be resolved and to warn anyone else stuck with legacy browsers that 2.6 may be less functional than 2.5 in some areas.

Regards

Dan

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Sorry to reply to myself, but as an additional (and one presumes connected) data point, this also appears to have broken the "Save Progress" button at the top of appraisals if the specific page hasn't previously been filled in. As an example, a manager starts the "Set Objectives" stage, and on the first page fills in a Text Entry field with an objective. They click the "Save Progress" button at the top of the screen rather than "Next" because they just want to save what they've done thus far. In IE8 this takes the user back to the list of stages and doesn't actually save any of the information which was entered. In other browsers, the green "Progress Saved" appears at the top of the screen and the user remains on the same page.

The workaround to this problem is to press the "Next" button, which will then save the content, but as it is the "Save Progress" button does not work as it should. Once the user has moved onto the next screen, navigating to the previous one leaves the "Save Progress" button disabled, but the "Save Changes" button which replaces "Next" works as expected.

Regards

Dan

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Hi Dan,

We have been pretty clear that IE8 is not supported, by Moodle or by Totara, on 2.6. I appreciate some customers still running older browsers will not be able to use 2.6 fully but we have no intention of supporting older browsers forever. And as Moodle are not supporting it then Totara would have to take on the burden of fixing all the IE8 issues throughout the Moodle core code as well as the Totara extensions which is not feasible.

So yes, customers who still have a significant base of users still on IE8 will only be able to have 2.5 as their highest version. However this is no different to the customers, and I'm sure they still exist, who still have corporate policies mandating IE6 who can only ever have 1.1.

Older browsers will always have some cut-off point beyond which users on those browsers will not be able to upgrade and for IE8 that point is 2.5.

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Hi,

Thanks for your reply, although obviously it's quite disappointing that Totara aren't willing to fix this since it's the specifically Totara bits that have been broken and on the face of it it's parts which haven't changed between 2.5 and 2.6. There are areas, such as the enhanced catalogue, where they are new and don't work properly on IE8, and that is entirely understandable and nobody would expect you to make those work, but when a good chunk of the appraisal system ceases to function as it did before without there having been any obvious changes to it, it feels more like a regression than simply not being able to take advantage of the newest features.

Regards

Dan

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Hi Dan,
I am the CEO so thought I'd jump in here and explain what's happening. We haven't done any regressions but the theming for v2.6 has changed and this is possibly the cause (though I'm not on technical support! ;-)

We cannot support IE8 on version 2.6 for the reasons explained by Ciaran. With Windows XP no longer supported the lifecycle of IE8 is coming to an end. Those realities are outside of our control. When we create new software, we cannot develop it to support 3rd party end of life software.

regards
Richard

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Thanks for your reply, really appreciate how seriously Totara are taking this from the fact that their CEO is replying to forum posts! I totally understand that you want to make a clean break from IE8 and avoid the ongoing support issues that fixing 2.6 for IE8 might entail, and believe me when I say that being on IE8 is far from ideal for us.

While XP support is no longer supported, I think that Windows 7 initially shipped with IE8 included and only post SP1 did it update to IE10. There are also a lot of (mainly government) organisations that haven't yet updated past XP and are paying for extended support contracts from Microsoft to ease the transition to Windows 7 because they have legacy software which doesn't work on anything later as yet.

None of that precludes you from saying IE9 is the minimum required to run Totara 2.6+, but I suspect there will be a number of organisations which will therefore be unable to update to 2.6 or 2.7. Those organisations won't be able to benefit from some of the fixes to things like appraisals which are planned for 2.7 and which won't be backported to 2.5, and will have to consider the features as they exist on 2.5.

Once again, thanks for your response, and hopefully something (possibly Tim's response below) will allow us to work around these issues.

Regards

Dan

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Matt at Catalyst has looked into this and found that the problems with IE8 on 2.6 are resolved by reverting back to an older version of JQuery (back to 1.9.1 instead of 2.1.0).

While our policy on IE8 and 2.6 isn't changing, this seems like it would be a small change that would help a lot of people so we're going to look if we can revert back to an old JQuery version for IE8 only. This should arrive as a patch in a 2.6 point release (either the one on 1st July or 2 weeks after that).

Simon

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Hey Everyone,

Just to let you know the patch Simon was talking about was included in todays (1st July 2014) release of Totara 2.6.4.

Cheers,
David

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Hi Dan, here at Think Associates we have a number of NHS subscribers who will be in the same position when they move on from 2.5. We've been actively investigating this and - as Richard W says - we think it's probably theme related and therefore relatively easy (read: lowish cost) to fix. Would you like to ask your Totara partner to talk to me and we'll see if this is something that all NHS users can collaborate on? Our initial plan is to work in 2.7 when it's out, because the underlying Moodle is long-term-support release.

Best wishes,

Tim

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Hi,

Really good to hear that other Totara Partners are also aware of this issue and looking at how it might be overcome. I have contacted our Totara Partner (Synergy) and asked them to get in touch with you, so hopefully we can start looking at this fairly soon and working out how major an undertaking it would be.

Regards

Dan

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