Dynamic HTML over PeopleSoft?

Question

Our college Portal site uses a Flash animation to display rotating content relevant to the current semester. My latest project involves presenting users with a static image on the Portal home page if their browser does not have Flash installed.
After visiting Adobe's site to find a Flash-detection script, I found two versions at Kirupa's site (http://www.kirupa.com/developer/mx/detection.htm). I've used both of the sample javascripts provided on this page. One detects the presence / absence of Flash and redirects the user accordingly (to either a page with a static image, or one with a Flash animation); the other detects and then displays either a Flash animation or a static image on the same page.
The Flash detection works, but not without issues. The first script accurately detects the presence of Flash, but doesn't display the animation. This may be because the animation is hosted on another server over https, but I doubt it, because the second script (tested with Opera 10.63 as the "non" browser, and with Firefox 3.6.13 and IE 7.0.5730 as the "with" browsers) does properly redirect the user, and the Flash does properly display for those of us with Flash installed.
The objective is to have the replacement image appear within the context of a single page, rather than to use redirection, so a DHTML script is the desired approach. The Kirupa script uses document.write to write the object and embed tags to the HTML body; with this approach, nothing happens when I view the page in any of the abovementioned browsers. I modified the script to write to the innerText (and then to the innerHTML) of a div element that I created to display the results. Nothing happens in that case either.
Does PeopleSoft play nice with DHTML? Is this a known issue, or am I just doing something wrong?

Answer 1

Just a thought -- is the problem because PeopleSoft is cutting off the end of your script? I had that problem trying to store the jQuery javascript library in HTML object in PeopleTools. Fortunately, the part of the javascript that it was cutting off didn't affect me. Back in 2009, I wrote a post about it:
http://psst0101.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/jquery-and-peoplesoft/
Jim Marion's solution was to store the javascript in a message catalog instead of an HTML definition.
http://jjmpsj.blogspot.com/2009/01/serve-thosejavascript-libraries-quickly.html
I have also created a table dedicated to holding javascript, and I use an iScript similar to Jim Marion's to read out the javascript. The only difference is that I select the javascript text from the database in my custom table rather than reading it from the message catalog.
Also, if you can break your javascript into multiple parts, you could place it in mutliple HTML definitions. The thing you have to think through is how you are going to migrate your code to production from the environment you are working on. HTML definitions will migrate easily. Message Catalog entries will migrate as long as you are going from database to database. I think you will have to move Pagelets manually and know for the sure the custom table idea. Just don't forget that in your go-live steps.
Edited by: Stephen Phillips on Feb 8, 2011 5:01 AM