change the href property with jQuery in IE8

Question

In a project I'm working on, I need to change the href value of a <a>-Tag dynamically.

So I'm using something like this:

var link = '/foo' // Some calculation to determine the correct link.
$('div.button-export a').attr('href', link);

And it works in every browser except - of course - IE8. It just ignores the .attr() method or there is a bug or what. I need the fix this for IE8 and I need to fix it fast.

Do you have any idea what the heck is going on in IE8 and how to solve this?

UPDATE: The full code

var exportLink = jQuery('div.button-export a').first();

// TODO: SHOULD DO THIS WITH THE getExtent() METHOD
var data = {
    box:[
        GRD.mapController.map.extent.xmin,
        GRD.mapController.map.extent.ymin,
        GRD.mapController.map.extent.xmax,
        GRD.mapController.map.extent.ymax
    ],
    sr:GRD.mapController.map.extent.spatialReference.wkid,
    layer:GRD.mapController.shownCountryLayer,
    layerNoRegions:GRD.mapController.shownCountryLayerNoRegions,
    urlRegions:encodeURIComponent(GRD.mapController.config.country),
    urlCountry:encodeURIComponent(GRD.mapController.config.countryNoRegions)
};

exportLink.prop('href', Routing.generate('api_export_report_pdf', { "id":CI.report.cid, "data":JSON.stringify(data) })).show();

Update Sorry for the confusion. Of course I used the correct selector. I just changed it a little. Still doesn't work.

Answer 1

Finally I was able to detect the problem. There was no real bug, the parsed DOM-Tree in the developer tool of IE 8 just didn't update, so I had to refresh it manually...

Also the link did not work, because there was a button inside and IE8 seems to have problems with <button> inside a <a>-Tag.

Sorry for all the confusion.