irs-efile-viewer icon indicating copy to clipboard operation
irs-efile-viewer copied to clipboard

Published 20 hours ago • verified publisher icon betson

Home page broken on Safari: "There was a problem generating 990 ."

Open jasonszhao opened this issue 5 years ago • 2 comments

Steps to Reproduce (Safari):

  1. Go to the project home page.
  2. Enter the demo URL
  3. Visit any of the "Transformation results."

Or just visit https://betson.github.io/irs-efile-viewer/transform.html?f=https%3A%2F%2Fs3.amazonaws.com%2Firs-form-990%2F201541349349307794_public.xml.

Result:

The new tab closes. "There was a problem generating 990 ." is displayed in red.

The console reports:

[Log] TypeError: Argument 1 ('node') to XMLSerializer.serializeToString must be an instance of Node (transform.js, line 262)
serializeToString
render — transform.js:333
(anonymous function) — transform.js:253
promiseReactionJob

Environment

This happens on my Safari 12.1.1 (14607.2.6.1.1), macOS 10.14.5.

It works perfectly fine on my Firefox 68 on the same machine.

Also, the ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, which uses an "e-file viewer adapted" from this project, works fine on my Safari.

jasonszhao avatar Aug 19 '19 04:08 jasonszhao

I don't know XML or XSLT, but the problem appears to be my Safari's XSL support. The program fails at when XSLTProcessor.transformToDocument is called here.

I made a small repro of this bug, and found that once such unsupported XSL tag in Safari seems to be xsl:include. Safari prints null, and other browsers (FF and Chrome) print a Document.

test.xsl - commenting out the include line would make this "compile" in Safari.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">

  <xsl:include href="dummy-include.xsl" />

  <xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">&lt;!DOCTYPE html&gt;</xsl:text>
    <html>
    </html>
  </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

dummy-include.xsl


<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format">
  <xsl:param name="AppProp" select="/AppData/ApplicationProperties" />

</xsl:stylesheet>

I'm not sure if its worth fixing this bug, since this project already uses XSLT files from the IRS. It might be worth looking into ProPublica's solution.

jasonszhao avatar Aug 19 '19 07:08 jasonszhao

Thanks for the detailed research on this. I've confirmed this still doesn't work on the most recent Safari either (version 15.5 on MacOS v12.4). Some naive searching says it may be due to a WebKit bug. This was originally created in the context of a Google Chrome issue back in 2009, though the transformations work fine in Chrome now.

In that Chromium thread there's a workaround proposed to request the XML of each <xsl:include> and merge that into the core .xsl file you're using for transformation. It could work, but I haven't run a test for that.

A better way of doing all of this is what ProPublica is probably doing -- running the transformations server-side. That's where I initially started with this project when I was building it as a proof-of-concept. But being able to run the transformations client-side gave me a lot more freedom to publish this without needing to indefinitely host and maintain the infrastructure to run the transformations.

betson avatar Jul 25 '22 04:07 betson