Triggering the refresh event in Internet Explorer

Question

On a dynamic site of mine I faced a problem that consists in the following:

In Internet Explorer 6 after changing the size of the div element with the help of JavaScript, its child elements that are 100% in height do not refresh right away (ie. do not stretch to their new size) but only when the parent div is clicked. It seems to me that the document needs some update. I'd like to ask if there is sort of a command (like that in Flash) that updates the document after some dynamic changes get happened? In brief, how can this problem be settled?

Answer 1

If you have to click on it to refresh, then why no try to simulate a click, after the size update. Simulating mouse clicks in JavaScript

Answer 2

Requiring reflow in IE6 is a very common problem with a massive CSS/JS base. Usually all you have to do is change a parameter on the element that requires a reflow, like, for example, set display:none and then back. This will cause browser to reflow objects in and around current object. Most of the time you will have to do it from JavaScript. If you don't want to do display, try changing height/width or add/remove flow or clear parameters. They all will cause reflows of the page.
However, most of the time if you are running into reflow issues in IE6 it usually means that either you have way too much CSS on the page, or you are using CSS for things it shouldn't be used for (like laying out elements on the page that in HTML go in a wrong order, i.e. element1, element2, element3 in HTML; element2, element1, element3 in display). I would suggest cleaning up your CSS and most of the times, reflow problems will go away.

Answer 3

I know that I have been burned (more than once unfortunately) to have returned invalid xml for an ajax response. IE in particular is very non-forgiving in this respect. It might be worth validating the response just to be sure. In some of my cases, the bad XML caused JS to fail and not "seem to work".