capture click on div surrounding an iframe

Question

How can i capture a click or mousedown event on a div surrounding an iframe. I've tried attaching the funciton to click event on the div but since the iframe never bubbles the event up to the surrounding div the function is never called. Is there a way i can capture the event on the div and then propagate it to the iframe for default action

Answer 1

If the click is in the iframe area, the iframe context handles the click event, it does not bubble up to the iframe parent. So the div will never register the click event at all if it happened in the iframe area.

Furthermore, if the iframe contains a page that does not belong to the same domain as the iframe parent, any interaction is prohibited (re. same origin policy).

When the same origin policy is met, there are a few things you can do, you could call a method in the iframe parent context:

top.parentFunction();

So in the iframe you add an event listener that delegates to the iframe parent (accessible with the top reference.

Propagating events is a lot more complicated, so I'm simply going to refer to Diego Perini's NWEvents library. I believe his event system to be one of the better ones out there and he's particular on iframe interaction.

I certainly would not start writing your own code to achieve this, this can easily be a year long project if you want to do it properly and even then will be inferior to Diego's work.

Answer 2

There's no "good" way to do it, but if you really need to detect a click on an Iframe, you can kind-of do it in the latest browsers.

<iframe src="http://mtw-ed.com/" id="iframe" style=""></iframe>

<script type="text/javascript">
var inIframe = false;
function checkClick() {
    if (document.activeElement 
      && document.activeElement === document.getElementById("iframe")) {
        if (inIframe == false) {
            alert("iframe click");
            inIframe = true;
        }
    } else
        inIframe = false;
}
setInterval(checkClick, 200);
</script>

This script will check every 200ms whether the user is in the Iframe. Of course, they may not have clicked on the Iframe to get there, but I'm afraid this is the best you can do without @BGerrissen's solution.

It will detect the first 'click' only, unless you click out again. It only works in really modern browsers.