Word/WordPerfect plugin loading webbrowser (ie9) crashes

Paul Fischer

Preface: The below issue only occurs when we are on a machine with IE9. IE10 and up works as expected and does not crash the word processor.

We have a word/wordperfect plugin that launches a webbrowser that in turn loads our web site. The website can interact with the document layer as well as utilizes a website back end (assembly engine, AE) for doing citation lookups and retain data.

Our website is built using angularjs(1.2). The word/wordperfect plugin is built in c# and uses VSTO for word.

The website will gather the list of data from AE and then display this list in the webbrowser. The problem we are having is that at some point from when we get the data from AE and before we display the list in the UI the word processor crashes.

We have taken several steps to try and fix this issue ourselves such as:

- Used reg keys to force IE to use legacy jscript engine as well as force browser emulation mode. Our web page uses standards mode.
- Refactored our UI to not have a huge scope tree.
- Refactored other parts of our client side app to help free up memory in other ways. Cleaning up listeners and properties no longer needed.
- Reduced the size of our data being used on the client side to help reduce memory footprint.

We believe it is a memory issue causing the crash but any other ideas or help is greatly appreciated.

Paul Fischer

After getting some initial help from Microsoft, they pointed out that word was crashing when the browser was trying to stringify JSON. After a quick search I found this stack overflow question: [link text][1]

The issue is that the angular $http service is causing issues when it tries to stringify the JSON data we need to pass to the server. If we switch to using jQuery ajax, the call works just as expected and the word processor doesn't crash.

I haven't looked too hard internally at the differences between $http and jQuery.ajax that would cause it to fail but if I do I will try to update this answer with an explanation.
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28114732/internet-explorer-11-crashes-when-angulars-http-post-is-used-with-large-complex