Pass information back from an iframe?

Question

Right now i'm building a firefox plugin that duplicates some functionality on my website. It takes in an email address and then returns information to the user. The easiest way to do this in the plugin is to use an Iframe and render that super simple form on my website. All of this works great, but to make the plugin really useful, i would like the plugin to have access to the information that the iframe renders, so it can use it in the current window that the user is in.

Is it possible to pass information back through an Iframe in this manner? I know there are quite a few domain access restrictions with Iframes, so any help or insight is appreciated!!

Answer 1

I've done this two ways.

If the iframe is on the same domain as the parent website, you can just, in javascript, access window.parent.

If it isn't, however...I've done a dirty trick. I'll share it here, though, as it may help.

We created a page on the other domain, which would call to window.parent.parent. We put that in a hidden iframe inside the iframed page, and send it a querystring argument or two. It's not pretty, but it gets around cross-domain scripting problems.

This basically means that you have this sort of thing:
admin.example.com
content.example.com - iframe
admin.example.com?contentid=350 - hidden iframe that makes a window.parent.parent call.

Answer 2

Is the point of this whole exercise functional testing of your website? If so, instead of your custom Firefox plugin, consider using Selenium to automate interactions with websites. It works with all major browsers and supports the inspection of page elements you are trying to do (using XPath). It also features a Firefox plugin called Selenium IDE that allows you to conveniently "record" your interactions with a website for automated playback later.