Using TDC’s Columbine with modern browsers

Published Thursday, April 14th, 2011 by AN

On columbine.tdc.dk there is a gui with tools for resellers of TDC eBSA products. These tools are crucial for interacting with the TDC systems, but unfortunately they only work in Internet Explorer right now. They seem pretty old and they made with hand-coded javascript. TDC seems to have plans to update the site to work with all browsers and if they ask me, I think they should just update the site to use a modern framework like jQuery.

I took a look at what seemed to be the problem. If I keep open the Firefox “Error Console” while browsing I see these two errors

Warning: Element referenced by ID/NAME in the global scope. Use W3C standard document.getElementById() instead.
Source File: https://columbine.tdc.dk/komik/SessionServer?code=wsess&pseudonym=wxvis
Line: 545

and

Error: MAINFORM is not a function
Source File: https://columbine.tdc.dk/komik/SessionServer?code=wsess&pseudonym=wxvis
Line: 545

Referencing by name in the global scope seems to be very old bad practice in form access. I can’t even find descriptions of it on the net. This and this are the closest mentions I can find.

Anyway, this seemed like a problem that should be easy to fix with a userscript / greasemonkey script. So I went ahead and made one and put it on github. I’ve only used it on “Vis eksisterende BB” and “Net-info” so it is only enabled for those two pages, and it might need changes to work on other pages (patches/forks welcome).

https://github.com/andersnorgaard/columbine-greasmonkey

It’s pretty simple. It uses the content script injection hack to create the required reference to “MAINFORM” in the global scope.

Enjoy.

Tags: greasemonkey, javascript
Posted in Techchat

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 14th, 2011 at 9:52 am and is filed under Techchat. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.