BI HAPPY

The EIC (External Interface Connection), is a key feature of Xcelsius that allows the creation of sophisticated integrated dashboard. It’s a programmatic way to pass information through javascript to and from the html container that embeds the Xcelsius swf object. If you never used it, be sure to check off this capability and at least understand it, so you can have a fuller picture of the product.
Xcelsius ships with some EIC connectivity samples that are used throughout as the base for implementation in projects. These samples represent best practice, and i typically start my coding with them. Well, recently, i ran into problems with teh EIC connectivity, especially with modern browsers, and particularly with IE9. With the invaluable help of my colleague Robert Blackburn (whose outstanding blog, http://rwblackburn.com/ is a tremendous resource) , we were able to narrow down the EIC connectivity issues to the javascript function used to call the swf object in the EIC samples, get Movie(). The getMovie() function is used in the EIC sample code as a utility function to obtain a reference to the swf object that you are working with. However, this function was written some years ago, and some of the js and html standards that existed at the time it was written have changed, in particular, IE9 is breaking some new grounds with its support (or non support) for functionality that is widely used and accepted in other browsers, such as firefox or chrome. In any case, we were able to identify the root cause for the EIC failures in the getMovie function and fix it. So, if you are having any problems with EIC values not working properly in IE, simply replace the getMovie() function with the one below:
function getMovie(movieName) {
var movie = undefined;
if (navigator.appName.indexOf(“Microsoft”) != -1) {
movie = document.getElementById(movieName);
} else {
movie = document[movieName];
}
return movie;
}