getElementById.contentDocument error in IE

Answer 1

From this page:

Mozilla supports the W3C standard of accessing iframe's document object through IFrameElm.contentDocument, while Internet Explorer requires you to access it through document.frames["name"] and then access the resulting document.

So you need to detect the browser and on IE do something like this instead:

document.frames['iView'].document; 

Answer 2

You seem to want to get the contents of the iframe right?

IE7 and FF2:

var iframe = document.getElementById('iView');
alert(iframe.contentWindow.document.body.innerHTML);

Answer 3

contentWindow.document.body.innerHTML

is working for me in Internet Explorer and Firefox, whereas

contentDocument.body.innerHTML

will only work in Firefox.

Answer 4

The cross-browser equivalent to contentDocument (including Firefox itself, where contentDocument does work) is contentWindow.document.

So try:

alert(document.getElementById('iView').contentWindow.document);

contentWindow gets you a reference to the iframe's window object, and of course .document is just the DOM Document object for the iframe.

Here's an article that summarizes better.

Answer 5

Do something like this:

var myFrame = document.getElementById('iView');
var frameDoc = myFrame.contentDocument || myFrame.contentWindow;

if (frameDoc.document){
  frameDoc = frameDoc.document;
}

alert(frameDoc);

See this page for more details

Answer 6

Use feature detection, as contentDocument is supported in IE 8:

var iframe = document.getElementById("iView");
var iframeDocument = null;
if (iframe.contentDocument) {
    iframeDocument = iframe.contentDocument;
} else if (iframe.contentWindow) {
    // for IE 5.5, 6 and 7:
    iframeDocument = iframe.contentWindow.document;
}
if (!!iframeDocument) {
    // do things with the iframe's document object
} else {
    // this browser doesn't seem to support the iframe document object
}