Struts \ POI \ Javascript Problem with IE 7

Question

Alright folks, I'm having a problem migrating my application from IE 6 to IE 7. We have search functionality in the app that triggers off of javascript calls when a button is pressed in the search. Once the data is retrieved, an export button becomes enabled that allows the user to export those results to Excel using POI. On the back end, we're using struts running in WAS 6. When the results are exported, the action class manually writes the excel workbook to the output stream as below:
     protected void print(HSSFWorkbook a_wb, HttpServletResponse a_response)
          throws IOException, ServletException {
          // generate output
          a_response.setContentType("application/vnd.ms-excel");
          ServletOutputStream out = a_response.getOutputStream();
          a_wb.write(out);
Then the action returns null to signify to struts that the response has already been handled manually.
Everything works perfectly in IE 6. In IE 7, however, everything is not so great. The search works to retrieve the results and I can export them to Excel. The problem is that after I export them to Excel, all the Javascript on my page ceases to work. Basically, what I've been able to determine is that upon receiving the Excel document response something is causing the document Javascript variable to become undefined. This causes all my javascript -- things like:
document.getElementById('actionIndicator').value ="Clear";
to completely fail because document is undefined. Mind you, the page is still sitting there rendered in IE, and I can do things like window.frames and programmatically see a list of the frames defined on the page -- but the document variable is completely gone.
At this point I'm kind of at a loss as to what to check or test next, so I'm open to any suggestions. Thanks!

Answer 1

Hey Gina
we have not seen broken images like you did, but have seen dramatic reduction in respose time with IE 7 (~20 times slower than normal). A bunch of IT folks tried various settings and configurations, with no success. Finally, we figured that different versions of IE 7 acd differently. Version 5700 was running fine. Version 5713 (or something like that, the latest one) was slooooow.
Our Office of Information Resources does not "support" any other browser than IE. So, in addition to problems with Office 2007 I described previously, we may get a double whammy from Microsoft. Don't get me started.
Vojin