Uneven behavior of IE XML / XSL in the same view and browser version, but with different domain user accounts

Question

Our user has a problem when trying to access one of the views of web applications (IE9, the behavior looks consistent in 6, 8 and 9, but not through domain accounts). For this particular Windows domain account, regardless of which credentials are used to access our application, or which machine browser is used; Attempting to access certain views causes IE to display the error message, "The stylesheet does not contain a document element. The stylesheet may be empty or may not be a valid XML document."

Other domain accounts cannot reproduce this error, and we, when we use a VPN, and use our own browsers, despite the same thing, with the same application credentials, the same permissions and group memberships for domain accounts corresponding IE9 versions (also verified using 8 and 6). We have about 50 individual clients using this version of the application, without such problems.

There is nothing in webapp logs that sheds light on this; success and failure requests and answers are exactly the same.

Manually adding the request to the URL in the address bar of the browser causes IE to display the XML response that we are expecting. The XML returned from the browser request, both in case of failure and success, looks well-formed.

For some time prior to this error, the web application in question is static. The client’s IT organization verified that permissions and group memberships are identical between domain accounts that can reproduce the error and those that cannot.

Any suggestions? Can setting an OLE or ODBC driver affect XML parsing at the domain account level? Can Internet Explorer act on different machines the same for the same domain account, having the same group memberships and permissions as accounts that cannot reproduce this behavior?

I can periodically get a problem area account to display the page correctly after clearing everything except the download history and passwords in the browser, however this is a minority of time, and after a few max requests (usually the first one though) an error message is displayed.

Answer 1

The ACCEPT header changes either when the page is cached or in the referrer is updated, and, apparently, this domain does not have access rights to the document. As a result, the MIME table type changes from application/xml or text/xsl to *.* Or text/html . The solution is to check the ACCEPT header and prevent caching or redirect failed requests:

 # Skip Opera RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Opera # Check the Accept header for text/html RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT} text\/html [OR] # Check the Accept header for image type or *.* RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT} gif|jpeg|png$|\*.\*$ # Forbid access if the file extension matches XSLT RewriteRule .*\.(xsl|xslt)$ - [F]