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Deep Zoom Tileset export gives an error in IE7

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Top 500 Contributor
Posts 2
priit Posted: 11-01-2008 3:47 PM

Hi,
If exporting a panorama from ICE to Deep Zoom Tileset, it finishes the export and opens IE7 and loads the page with home, zoom in/out controls, but no panorama and it contains the following error:

The script element with ID 'dzxmlembed' does not contain a valid HD View XML file.

My system is WinXPSP3 x86, IE7 (7.0.5730.11), Silverlight 2 RTW (2.0.31005.0), ICE 1.1r1

I've noticed that I get the same error while viewing the samples like:
http://research.microsoft.com/ivm/HDViewSL/Rainier360.html

I tested the official samples also on another machine: Vista SP1 x86, IE7 (7.0.6001.18000), Silverlight 2 RTW (2.0.31005.0), with the same results.

Any ideas what's causing this error?
Priit

Top 75 Contributor
Posts 9

I've figured out the problem.  Unfortunately, the "HD View SL" application used by ICE to display Deep Zoom tile sets has a bug that causes it to read some information incorrectly on systems whose Regional and Language Options specify certain languages (like Estonian and Finnish) for the input format.

I have fixed the bug in HD View SL, and the correction will be included the next time we release a version of ICE.  (Also, for anyone interested in the Silverlight source code for HD View SL, the fix is now available on CodePlex.)

In the meantime, here are the steps you can use to correct the problem in any Deep Zoom tile sets you have created with the current version of ICE:

  1. After exporting a Deep Zoom tile set from ICE, copy the HDViewSL.xap file that you downloaded in step 1 to the same folder used for the ICE export.

Thanks very much for pointing out this problem, Priit!

Eric Stollnitz
Interactive Visual Media Group
Microsoft Research

Top 500 Contributor
Posts 2

Hi,
Thanks a lot, yes, switching to English language settings or using the updated .xap file provided a workaround for the issue.

Anyway, I've noticed another issue, if I specify any umlaut characters "öäü" in ICE Deep Zoom export folder/filename I get an error in IE: "Could not load image tile." It does not go away even if I fix the imageset url value in html with the correct umlaut character. It is not fixed either by stripping all the files/folders of the umlaut characters. Only a new export to a filename without umlaut characters makes it work again. 

Maybe its the same issue and is already fixed?
Thanks in advance!

Top 75 Contributor
Posts 9

The problem with umlaut characters is a separate issue from the numeric parsing problem.  It looks like there are actually two issues with umlauts (and non-ASCII characters in general) in filenames:

  1. ICE seems to be writing the URL pattern in the XML that's embedded in the HTML file using Windows-1252 encoding, when the HTML file itself is written using ISO-8859-1 encoding.  This is a bug in ICE.
  2. Even if I replace the incorrectly encoded URL pattern with the correctly encoded URL pattern by editing the HTML file (using copy-paste), I find that Internet Explorer and Firefox only load the image tiles when the web page comes from a web server.  I get the same "could not load image tile" error when I try to preview the HTML page from local disk.  This appears to be a limitation of Silverlight.

Fortunately, there is a simple workaround.  There is no need to change the names of any files or folders on the disk, and no need to export again.  If you open the HTML file in your favorite editor, you can replace the incorrectly encoded URL pattern with one that works, using "%" encoding for any non-ASCII characters from the ISO-8859-1 character set:

  • replace "ä" with "%E4"
  • replace "ö" with "%EB"
  • replace "ü" with "%FC"

Additional values to use in "%" encoding can be found in the table of ISO-8859-1 characters on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8859-1.

I will make a note of this issue so that we can address it in a future release of ICE by automatically applying "%" encoding to non-ASCII characters.  Thanks again for helping us improve ICE!

Eric Stollnitz
Interactive Visual Media Group
Microsoft Research

Top 25 Contributor
Posts 40

You can also manually install the new HDViewSL.xap file Eric provides above into the ICE DeepZoom export template so that all subsequent projects exported from ICE will have the updated .xap. This way things will work and you won't have to wait for our next update

  1. Find the ICE "Plain" Deep Zoom template. Typically, it is here:
    C:\Program Files\Microsoft Research\Image Composite Editor\Templates\Deep Zoom Templates\Plain
  2. Drop the HDViewSL.xap file (from http://research.microsoft.com/ivm/HDViewSL/HDViewSL.xap) into that directory, replacing the one that is already there.

Now any subsequently exported Deep Zoom panos will use the new .xap file.

-Bryan
Image Composite Editor Team

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