views:

276

answers:

3

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"&gt;

<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?

A: 

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.

Robusto
Yes, that does work. But that doesn't fix what I'm really trying to do, move nodes from child to parent.
Adam
A: 

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"));
Eli Grey
Your first example wouldn't work in practice because I don't have control over how the div element is created.I'm getting an "Object doesn't support this property or method" error when trying to call "adoptNode".
Adam
A: 

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().

Adam