Resizing an iframe based on content

Question

I am working on an iGoogle-like application. Content from other applications (on other domains) is shown using iframes.

How do I resize the iframes to fit the heigh

Answer 1

This is an old thread, but in 2020 it's still a relevant question. I've actually posted this answer in another old thread as well^^ (https://stackoverflow.com/a/64110252/4383587)

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Just wanted to share my solution and excitement. It took me four entire days of intensive research and failure, but I think I've found a neat way of making iframes entirely responsive! Yey!

I tried a ton of different approaches... I didn't want to use a two-way communication tunnel as with postMessage because it's awkward for same-origin and complicated for cross-origin (as no admin wants to open doors and implement this on your behalf).

I've tried using MutationObservers and still needed several EventListeners (resize, click,..) to ensure that every change of the layout was handled correctly. - What if a script toggles the visibility of an element? Or what if it dynamically preloads more content on demand? - Another issue was getting an accurate height of the iframe contents from somewhere. Most people suggest using scrollHeight or offsetHeight, or combination of it by using Math.max. The problem is, that these values don't get updated until the iframe element changes its dimensions. To achieve that you could simply reset the iframe.height = 0 before grabbing the scrollHeight, but there are even more caveats to this. So, screw this.

Then, I had another idea to experiment with requestAnimationFrame to get rid of my events and observers hell. Now, I could react to every layout change immediately, but I still had no reliable source to infer the content height of the iframe from. And theeen I discovered getComputedStyle, by accident! This was an enlightenment! Everything just clicked.

Well, see the code I could eventually distill from my countless attempts.

function fit() {
    var iframes = document.querySelectorAll("iframe.gh-fit")

    for(var id = 0; id < iframes.length; id++) {
        var win = iframes[id].contentWindow
        var doc = win.document
        var html = doc.documentElement
        var body = doc.body
        var ifrm = iframes[id] // or win.frameElement

        if(body) {
            body.style.overflowX = "scroll" // scrollbar-jitter fix
            body.style.overflowY = "hidden"
        }
        if(html) {
            html.style.overflowX = "scroll" // scrollbar-jitter fix
            html.style.overflowY = "hidden"
            var style = win.getComputedStyle(html)
            ifrm.width = parseInt(style.getPropertyValue("width")) // round value
            ifrm.height = parseInt(style.getPropertyValue("height"))
        }
    }

    requestAnimationFrame(fit)
}

addEventListener("load", requestAnimationFrame.bind(this, fit))

That is it, yes! - In your HTML code write . The gh-fit is a just fake CSS class, used to identify which iframe elements in your DOM should be affect by the script. The gh-fullwidth is a simple CSS class with one rule width: 100%;.

The above script automatically fetches all iframes from the DOM, that have a .gh-fit class assigned. It then grabs and uses the pre-calculated style values for width and height from document.getComputedStyle(iframe), which always contain a pixel-perfect size of that element!!! Just perfect!

Note, this solution doesn't work cross-origin (nor does any other solution, without a two-way communication strategy like IFrameResizer). JS simply can't access the DOM of an iframe, if it doesn't belong to you.

The only other cross-origin solution I can think of, is to use a proxy like https://github.com/gnuns/allorigins. But this would involve deep-copying every request you make - in other words - you 'steal' the entire page source code (to make it yours and let JS access the DOM) and you patch every link/path in this source, so that it goes through the proxy as well. The re-linking routine is a tough one, but doable.

I'll probably try myself at this cross-origin problem, but that's for another day. Enjoy the code! :)