Question

I have a site that is using jQuery UI to display forms located on another domain in a modal dialog box using iFrames to contain the external pages. So: user clicks a button on mysite.com/page.html, dialog pops up displaying google.com or myform.com/form1.asp, etc. The problem is that form1.asp is also using jQuery (jquery.uniform, to be precise) to make fancy dropdown lists. When opened inside the iframe + Dialog combo in Internet Explorer 7, The dropdowns do not work. I have not seen or heard complaints about this in any other browser (though it is a fair bet other IE versions have the problem, too), but a large portion of the viewership of the site uses IE7 so we cannot just ignore the issue.

Has anyone seen anything like this and can you suggest a fix? Is this some problem with IE not being able to load the script in the iframe?

Thanks,

• Matt

Answer 1

The answer is actually above in my comments but I will put it here, too:

The custom form in the external domain is using a jQuery plugin to generate the fancy dropdown lists. This plugin, for whatever reason, does not work within an iframe in Internet Explorer 7. This seems to be a browser issue because I can run it just fine in every other browser available to me (FF, GC, IE9) including IE9 in IE7 mode (quirks and standard). The solution to avoid this problem in IE7, therefore, is to not use this plugin. Fortunately there are plenty of jquery and other javascript plugins available which accomplish the same requirements.

I tested this by creating a very simple html document with only the one iframe in it pointing to the home page for the creators of the plugin (they have a sample on the page). It did not work even on this simple page and this is how and why I draw this conclusion. It may very well be that the plugin would work if the form was on the same domain as the page with the iframe, but I did not test that.

Thanks to anybody who gave this question serious thought!