CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptdomiframeframes
aakoch
aakoch

Reputation: 1174

Can't appendChild to a node created from another frame

I have a page with an iframe and would like to extract a DOM node from the child frame and put it on the parent page. This works in Firefox (3.5), but not in Internet Explorer (7).

I've broken down the code to the simplest I can.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

<html>
<head>
<title>Fragment</title>
</head>

<body>

<iframe src="blank.html"></iframe>

<script type="text/javascript">
window.onload = function () {
    var fragment = document.createDocumentFragment();
    var div = frames[0].document.createElement("div");
    fragment.appendChild(div);
};
</script>

</body>
</html>

I get an error "Invalid argument" on the "fragment.appendChild(div);" line. The error seems to stem from the fact that I'm creating the document fragment from the iframe's document and the div element from the parent document. This code works if both use the same document.

I want to keep any events that might be attached to the DOM nodes, so I don't want to use innerHTML.

Anyone know a fix for this?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 6322

Answers (3)

aakoch
aakoch

Reputation: 1174

I think I found the answer here: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/crossbrowserscripting/

Importing documents from two different ownerDocument properties ... requires the use of the DOM Level 2 method importNode(), since in these cases the DOM will not allow a simple document.appendChild().

Upvotes: 0

Eli Grey
Eli Grey

Reputation: 35903

Your problem is that you are not adopting the nodes into the fragment that are created in the current document. Use either the following:

fragment.appendChild(fragment.ownerDocument.createElement("div"));

or

fragment.appendChild(fragment.ownerDocument.adoptNode(document.createElement("div"));

Upvotes: 4

Robusto
Robusto

Reputation: 31913

I'm just hazarding a guess here, but you could try creating the div using 

var div = frames[0].document.createElement("div")

instead of 

var div = document.createElement("div")

Using the main document's createElement() method may be why IE is having a problem.

Upvotes: 2

Related Questions