Group Membership: Search for Groups redirects to the homepage (IE7)

[craigfowler]

Version Affected

My Plone site is 3.1.6/Linux.

This bug affects Internet Explorer version 7 as far as I can tell. It may also affect other browsers, including IE6 and/or IE8 but I haven't tested in those environments. I could not reproduce it in Firefox 3/Linux.

Whilst it seems strange that the problem is browser-specific, I believe that it is because JavaScript is used in a form submission, and if that JavaScript fails to execute completely the "without JavaScript" behavior is incorrect.

Steps to reproduce

As a site administrator, navigate to: Site Setup » Users and Groups » Pick a User and enter their properties page » Group Memberships

Search for a group (with intent to add the user to that group). In IE7, on clicking the search button, you are sent to the root of the site and thrown out of the site setup/control panel.

Ideas as to Cause

I have briefly inspected the HTML with FF/Firebug and I believe the problem is in the <form> tag that wraps that "search for groups" widget. The tag (on my site) reads:

<form method="post" name="groups" action="http://url-to-site-root">

I presume that the click event of the submit button is caught by some JavaScript on the page, which changes the way that the form is submitted, meaning that a search is performed. It is hard to tell, but possibly there is an incompatibility with this JavaScript in IE7, which means that the form just gets submitted to the site root (and does nothing)? Someone more familiar with Plone's JavaScript might be able to determine that to a better degree.

Workaround Discovered

Rather than adding users to groups from their user properties page, instead navigate to: Site Setup » Users and Groups » Groups » Pick a group and enter it's membership page

And then search for users to add to the group (IE: Add the user to the group rather than adding the group to the user). The search widget on the group memberships page does not exhibit this odd redirection problem.

[kleist]

Using IE 7.0 on Windows XP, with Plone soon-to-be 3.3 (using Plonenext) I can confirm this odd behavior. Sort of...

If I press RETURN (with the cursor in the search field, no matter if the field is empty or not), I'm redirected to the Plone site root as described.

However, when clicking the "Search" button the search works fine.