Problems Expanding Backup Exec Reports In IE 11

The failure appears to be consistent, for me, whether the log is emailed or saved from BE. I have tested this at five different sites, where I administer BE environments and the failures are consistent and specific to the inventory jobs in IE11, for logs generated post BE 12.5.

Hmm I just ran in inventory job (on a B2D devcie) and save the job log and job history logs, then copied them to a Windows 7 system, both logs still opene and expand correctly as such I still can't reproduce against your findings, and you may still need to log a formal support case (or see if going to BE 15 solves your condition)

Are you actually saving the logs, or sending a job completion alert that contains the logs via e-mail and then opening them from the e-mail?

Hi Colin,

Thanks for your reply. I too have done some further testing.

In my testing the behaviour is as follows:

FAILURE: The report displays in a fully expanded state, with an ActiveX content warning. Clicking on "Allow blocked content" causes the log report to collapse rendering it unexpandable. Or the job log appears collapsed with no ActiveX warning and remains collapsed and unusable.

The failure appears to be specific to inventory job logs, post BE 12.5 and post IE10...

Test results:

1. Win8.1 IE 11:

     BE 12.5 Inventory log: works correctly

     BE 2014 Backup job log: works correctly

     BE 2010 Inventory log: FAILURE

     BE 2014 Inventory log: FAILURE

2. Win2012R2 IE 11:

     BE 12.5 Inventory log: works correctly

     BE 2014 Backup job log: works correctly

     BE 2010 Inventory log: FAILURE

     BE 2014 Inventory log: FAILURE

3. Win7x64 IE10:

     BE 12.5 Inventory log: works correctly

     BE 2014 Backup job log: works correctly

     BE 2010 Inventory log: works correctly

     BE 2014 Inventory log: works correctly

So, this suggests that the team fixed the bug for the backup job logs in IE11 but missed the inventory job logs.

Cheers,

David

I just saved a job log from Backup Exec 2014 SP2 and then opened it in IE11 (on the same computer)

1) It opened correctly (with a security warning at the bottom that I clicked Allow on)

2) I could expand all the containers

I then repeated the test with the saved log copied to a Windows 7 client running IE 11 (64bit) and that also allowed me to open the job log and expand the containers.

As such if this is not working for you then please log a formal support case.

Note: these tests were done with a newly run job which I saved the log from

Contrary to Symantec claiming this is fixed, here: http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH217798

Solution

I can confirm this is still not working with logs from BEWS 2014 SP2 in IE11

No surprise...

Sigh!

OK, being annoyed by this issue for a while, I went in and checked out the Javascript code that manages the report interactivity and figured out what needs to be changed to get it to work both in IE (8-11) and Chrome.  I don't use FF, but I'd imagine the changes will work for it as well, since they're standard DOM objects and methods.

There are two Javascript functions named Expand() and ExpandAll() that control this functionality.  In order to fix the Expand() function, only one line of code needs to be changed:

var child = srcElement.parentElement.parentElement.all[srcElement.getAttribute('child',false)];

needs to become

var child = srcElement.parentElement.parentElement.querySelector("#"+th[i].getAttribute('child',false));

The querySelector() method is supported back to IE 8 and in Chrome.  I remember from my days of DHTML coding that the use of the all property is "frowned upon in this establishment" because it doesn't translate well across browsers other than IE, and even IE balks at it nowadays in some places.

As for the ExpandAll() function, it needs a few more changes.  The same change as above needs to be made to querySelector(), as well as the following block

var th = document.all.tags('TH');
for (var i=0;i<th.length;i++) {
   for (var j=0;j<th[i].all.length;j++) {
      if (th[i].all[j].tagName == 'INPUT') {
         th[i].all[j].value = image; } } }

needs to become

var th = document.getElementsByTagName('TH');
for (var i=0;i<th.length;i++) {
   for (var j=0;j<th[i].childNodes.length;j++) {
      if (th[i].childNodes[j].tagName == 'INPUT') {
         th[i].childNodes[j].value = image; } } }

Again, the all property needs to be replaced by childNodes for it to work in IE 11, and getElementsByTagName will make it work in Chrome.

Now as for applying the fix, if there's some kind of HTML or XSLT template file that's used to build the report from the source XML file, then changing the function code there will fix the issue permanently.  But if the presentation logic is coded into the BE application itself, then only Symantec can patch that for us.  I tried looking (although not very hard) for a generic template in the program folder, but didn't see anything that might be it.  If anyone knows about that, please reply and I'll test it out.  The other option is to set up a script (Powershell) on the server to run at a set interval through Task Scheduler that parses all .htm files in the Data directory and makes these changes automatically.  However, that would be correcting it after the fact, as I'm guessing the original report file would have been e-mailed out to me immediately before being stored on the server for very long.

And I don't know whether this was corrected in BE 2014.  I don't have plans to upgrade from BE 2012 yet.

Any updates on this issue? I'm having the same issue with IE11 and BE2010R3 reports.

Same issue with BE2012 and Chrome any ideas??