Another day, another random mind-boggling Dreamweaver crash.

A few days ago, I was working on a PHP/MySQL project.  The project was simple and the timeline was short so I opted to use Dreamweaver's built-in functions to connect to my database and insert values from my form when a user clicked the submit button.  I'd done this before and it's simple enough, but this time when I tried to do it Dreamweaver gave me this lovely error message:

While executing onChange in InsertRecord.htm, the following JavaScript error(s) occurred:

At line 646 of file "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Dreamweaver CS3\configuration\ServerBehaviors\PHP_MySQL\InsertRecord.js": TypeError: name has no properties

An hour of searching Google didn't help me find a solution so I finally opened this JavaScript file and decided to figure it out myself.

The answer is surprisingly simple.  It turns out that the problem was due to my form elements not having a name attribute.  I typically write all my XHTML from scratch and generally just give all my form elements an ID attribute.   The JavaScript that Dreamweaver uses to identify the form elements (and match them with their database fields) relies solely on the name attribute.  Without it, Dreamweaver throws this not so graceful error message.

So there you have it.  If you get this error message, double check that all of your form fields have proper names.

Permalink | Posted On June 30, 2008 Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I just wasted an hour of my life figuring this out so I thought I'd share in case anyone else has the same problem. This happened to me using Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 but may be relevant to previous versions as well.

I was working on some CSS for a multi-tier dropdown menu when all of a sudden Dreamweaver just shut itself down. No warning. No error message. Just Poof! Gone. When I restarted, the splash screen came up and the program would start to load, get to the part where it said something about "Initializing Site Cache" and then just vanish. It turns out that I'd corrupted my cache file which rendered Dreamweaver inoperable.

By re-naming the folder I was working in, I got Dreamweaver to start loading again.  Since it could no longer find my site it didn't see the bad cache and the program would load.  When I tried to switch back to editing my site though, the problem would happen again, even after disabling and re-enabling the cache.  Something was causing my cache to go haywire.

I'd been debugging some IE6 issues (imagine that) and had been commenting and un-commenting various lines of my external stylesheet.  During one of these debug sessions I'd apparently left a rogue */ at the end of a CSS block.  Having the comment close marker but not the comment open marker was enough to send Dreamweaver into a frenzy.

So if you run into a similar issue with Dreamweaver crashing and burning, check the latest edits you made to your files.  If there's invalid markup it can apparently cause Dreamweaver's cache to explode and ruin your day.

Permalink | Posted On April 29, 2008 Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)