Topic awaiting preservation: Passing data to an Iframe (Page 1 of 1)

Hello everyone!

Today I am trying to pass data to an iframe from the parent window.

On my site at: http://www.safarri.com, there is an iframe containing a javascript tree menu with all the categories. Since I plan to have a lot of categories, I want people to be able to cache the category iframe. I also want the menu to open up to the category they last visited automatically.

Right now, I use the following code to initiate the menu from within the iframe:

<script type=\"text/javascript\" src=\"http://www.safarri.com/includes/dTree/dtree.js\"></script>
<script type=\"text/javascript\">
<!--
categories = new dTree('categories');
categories.config.closeSameLevel = true;

{$category List}

document.write(categories);
categories.openTo('.$_SESSION['safarriLastCategory'].', true);
//-->
</script>

My problem is the last line of JS. Since the users $_SESSION['safarriLastCategory'] is always changing, their browser can't cache the category list. What I am hoping is that there's a way to execute the categories.openTo('.$_SESSION['safarriLastCategory'].', true); from the calling window, so the user's browser can cache the category list.

Any suggestions would be appreciated!

-Robur

Sorry to post twice, but I've been thinking and here's what I've come up with as possible solutions:

1) I pass the user's "lastCategory" variable to to the iframe before it's built (possibly through a special iframe tag?), and the iframe figures out the rest.

2) I execute the categories.openTo('.$_SESSION['safarriLastCategory'].', true); from the parent window. (not sure if this is possible)

3) I set some "global javascript variable" that can be read by the iframe. (Note that I don't want to use cookies, as my site already sets one session cookie and I don't like bombarding the user.)

One to thing to note is that I can't pass any variables through the iframe's url, because the main goal of this hole thing is to get the browser to cache the category iframe.

After listing all these things, you're probably wondering why I didn't just do it myself. The reason is actually quite simple; I have practically no experience with JS.

Thank You,

-Robur

Well you could pass the last Category to the iframe with the query string

Info Here

Or from the parent window something like so:

document.frames.[iframename].variablename



.:[ Never resist a perfect moment ]:.

Bitdamaged:

I definitley don't want to use the querystring, remember the whole purpose of this is to have the browser cache the iframe.

Your second example is (I think) just what I was looking for.
I will give a status report soon!

-Robur

Don't use frames.
Use SSI.

Problem solved.

[ ] - reisio has understood why robur wanted to use an iframe in the first place.


option 3 would be the way to go. Have a variable on/in the parent window, access that from the iframe,
output $_SESSION['lastCategory'] into that variable on page load -voila, user might be caching iframe contents.

so long,

->Tyberius Prime

Reisio:

Sorry, but I don't know anything about SSIs except that they stand for "Secure Socket Interface", or something like that.

Tyberius Prime:

That is exactly what i've been trying to do. The only problem is that I don't know how to do it :-) I'me not too good with Javascript, and the example BiTdAmAgEd gave triggered the error (in firefox) "document.frame is not a valid resource" or something like that.

What i really need to know is the way to pass data to a frame.

Thanks for all your help so far!

-Robur

SSI = Server Side Includes
http://www.gurusnetwork.com/tutorial/server_side_includes/

You are going to get this error if you are trying to change the variable before the page/iframe loads. You can add an iframe onload event handler to do this.

Check out this tute



.:[ Never resist a perfect moment ]:.

After reading the tutorial refrenced by BitDamaged, I got it working!

The code I used on the parent page is:

<input type="hidden" value="<?=$_SESSION['safarriLastCategory']?>" id="lastCategoryID" />
<iframe src="/classifieds/templates/categoryTree.php" name="cTree" id="cTree" width="180" marginwidth="0" height="300" marginheight="0" align="top" scrolling="auto" frameborder="0" /></iframe>

and the code I used on the iframe is:

lastCategory = parent.document.getElementById('lastCategoryID').value;
if(lastCategory) {
categories.openTo(lastCategory, true);
}


I knew it'd be something simple like that

Hope this helps someone else!

-Robur

P.S. See it in action at safarri.com ! (Notice the "Ad Categories" box on the right)