How to access the XML document in an iFrame?

Question

I have an iFrame on my page which is displaying an XML document.

<iframe id="iFrame2" name="iFrame2"  width="100%" height="100%">

I need to access the XML document in the iFrame from the parent page. How do I do this?

When I try:

console.log(iFrame2.document);

I get the following error:

Permission denied for <http://localhost:3000&gt; to get property Window.document from <http://www.imageshack.us&gt;.

Answer 1

See the comp.lang.javascript FAQ:

http://www.jibbering.com/faq/#frameRef

Answer 2

In javascript? Perhaps something like this document.getElementById('iFrame2').contentWindow.document

Answer 3

I don't believe there is a cross-browser way to access an XML document on a different domain. The easiest way around this is to set up a small proxy on your server that grabs the data, then simply make an Ajax call to the server.

I've never used Rails, so I don't know exactly what this would look like on the server-side (you'd have to create a separate question for that), but basically you would have it set up so that your server would, upon request, download that XML file and spit it back out as text. The client would then get this XML data using an Ajax request (Google that if you don't know what that is) and manipulate it with JavaScript.

So, assuming you are using jQuery, your domain is www.example.com, and you have a view called getxml that gets the XML data and returns it, you'd have something like this in the JavaScript:

$.get('http://www.example.com/getxml', function(xml) {
    // Manipulate the `xml` variable here
}, 'xml');

(See jQuery.get() for documentation.)