mod_speling Breaks Flash Forms in ColdFusion
We were setting up a new server for our ecommerce site, and we knew that the code was primarily used in Windows environments. Having wrestled with apps built by developers who think “case sensitve” means not buying animal skin luggage, we decided to be preemptive and configure mod_speling to make Apache case-insensitive on Linux.
The ColdFusion 8 installer creates an alias on Linux systems from cfide to CFIDE so that either will work. Flash forms need to call the scripts folder in CFIDE in order to load their various components. On this server, Flash 10 on Safari would show the “Initializing” message and fill the loading bar, then stop. No error, nothing. Firefox on OS X would show the loading window, then throw an error “RSL Load Failed” and stop at 40%. Googling this problem led us to believe that it couldn’t find the .swf or even the scripts folder.
I suspected mod_speling fairly early on, and disabled it. No luck. Reinstall CF, build a completely new server, lots of time wasted. I never could get the debug version of Flash Player 10 on OS X to work and dump a trace, and there aren’t any instructions for this specific version that I found. None of the log files were any help, no error messages, nothing. The best we could do was look at the network activity on the client and see what the page was trying to load. It looked like it was finding all of the files.
Finally, I checked the SSL config that was included in the Apache config on the server. Spellcheck was turned on there as well, and we had missed it. Turned it off, and suddently Flash forms work again. We still don’t know exactly why they failed, but it obviously has something to do with redirects and aliases for the CFIDE and/or scripts folder.
ADDENDUM: Turns out the CheckSpelling directive works in .htaccess files. So we have case sensitivity and flash forms coexisting, for now. This fellow found a rather unique solution too, but I haven’t tested it.
