Magento Upgrade to 1.7, Fix for Sales Order Tab Contents in Left Sidebar

If following an upgrade to Magento 1.7 you’re having a problem that the Sales Order View tab contents are stuck in the sidebar (see below) you’re likely ripping your hair out as to why this is happening

In the page you’ll find a line of Javascript: sales_order_view_tabsJsTabs = new varienTabs(‘sales_order_view_tabs’, ‘sales_order_view’, ‘sales_order_view_tabs_order_info’, []);

The problem

This is the javascript which renders the tabs on the page, moving the tab contents to the main content area once the page has loaded. The second parameter here is the destination element. The issue I was having was that the element with the id ‘sales_order_view’ wasn’t in the HTML. This div is contained in app/design/adminhtml/default/default/template/sales/order/view/form.phtml, but this wasn’t being loaded.

The solution

In my case this was a code/local overridden core class Mage_Sales_Model_Order. In Magento 1.7 the method canReorder() has been renamed to canReorderIgnoreSalable(). Renaming the overridden method fixed my problem