Getting uploadify to work

http://www.uploadify.com

17^th of July 2009

Uploadify is a great tool. I'm using it so that people can mass upload photos for a photo gallery app I'm working on. This afternoon I've spent about 3-4 hours trying to get it to work on Windows (IE, Chrome, Firefox). It wasn't easy but I think I got it working in the end.

Pitfall no 1 (easy)

The Javascript code that "wraps" the "uploader.swf" had a bug in how it calculated the installed Flash version in IE (only tested in IE6). So I fixed that and will shortly send a patch to the uploadify.com.

Pitfall no 2 (hard)

I've got nginx on the server passing requests to a Django daemon via FCGI. For some obscure reason, on Windows, if the file uploader.swf was served as a static file directly from nginx it wouldn't work and I would get 403 errors that are never explained in the nginx error log or anything. So I changed it to let Django serve up the uploader.swf file which obviously sets headers differently and then it worked.

Headers when served directly by nginx:

 HTTP/1.1 200 OK
 Server: nginx/0.6.34
 Date: Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:01:09 GMT
 Content-Type: application/x-shockwave-flash
 Content-Length: 18659
 Last-Modified: Wed, 08 Jul 2009 12:29:52 GMT
 Connection: keep-alive
 Accept-Ranges: bytes

Headers when served from Django (django.views.static.serve):

 HTTP/1.1 200 OK
 Server: nginx/0.6.34
 Date: Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:01:03 GMT
 Content-Type: application/x-shockwave-flash
 Connection: keep-alive
 Last-Modified: Wed, 08 Jul 2009 12:29:52 GMT
 Content-Length: 18659
 Vary: Cookie

Pitfall no 3 (super complex)

It was working in Firefox Linux, Safari Mac, Firefox Mac but not IE6 Windows, Firefox Windows or Chrome Windows. This despite having the latest (and same as Linux) version of Flash (10.0.22.x)!

Solution: In Internet Explorer, click on Options and delete the cookies, temporary Internet files and Clear History (for good measure). Now it works!!

It's been a hell of a journey but now it's crossed. Let's hope I can save some other poor sucker a couple of hours by making this blog available.

UPDATE

ow it's stopped working again. Works in Opera Windows but not IE 8 in windows 7. Grr...!

UPDATE 2

I've completely abandoned Uploadify now and instead gone for Swfupload which actually works really well.

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