Microsoft KB Archive/302688

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Troubleshooting Context-Sensitive Cobranding

Article ID: 302688

Article Last Modified on 9/30/2003



APPLIES TO

  • Microsoft Passport 1.3
  • Microsoft Passport 1.4



This article was previously published under Q302688

SUMMARY

Changing the look and feel of your cobranding based on a particular context substantially increases the versatility of Passport cobranding. For example, imagine that your site has a "Preferred Customer" section and a regular section. You can use existing contextual information about your site (the originating URL, for example) to pass a query string variable on to your cobranding template code. Your cobranding template in turn contains branching code based on this variable, and produces cobranded HTML content for a preferred customer that is entirely different from what it produces for a regular user. See the "More Information" section for some general troubleshooting steps for context-sensitive cobranding.

MORE INFORMATION

  • Verify that calls to the AuthURL2 and LogoTag2 methods of the Passport Manager object include the optional coBrandArgs parameters. This is how context is passed to your cobranding template's query string.
  • Make certain that the cobranding template that you have written will accept the GET query string and return different cobranding information as JavaScript variables through branching based on values that are passed with the coBrandArgs parameter.
  • Verify that coBrandArgs query string variables are reasonably short.
  • Make sure that coBrandArgs are URL encoded.
  • Work backwards: What happens if no coBrandArgs is specified? Does the cobranding template give the expected results?
  • Hit your cobranding template URL directly by using a browser rather than by relying on the network pages to load them. Try this with different query string values that you expect your file to handle and save the results as text files. Make sure the resulting text files use valid JavaScript syntax and would not produce syntax errors if given verbatim as a script SRC.


Keywords: kbinfo KB302688