Question

I have been writing a browser based application (or rather, rapid prototyping an application) using HTML and Javascript. I would like the main window to be able to display popup windows with dynamic data. However, I cannot figure out how to push data from a parent window to a popup window in Javascript. Note, I am working with the assumption that the application may be used in “offline” scenarios, so all dynamic data should be coming from the main window.

Ideally, I’d like to write

var popup = window.open("popup.html", someidentifier, "");
popup.document.getElementById("SomeIdInPopupHtml").innerHTML = "1,2,3,4";

However, the getElementById function returns NULL. How can I push data to popup windows from a parent window?

Answer 1

Is the popup serving content from a different domain than the parent? If so, the short answer is you can’t.

The long answer is that you can sent the popup’s href fragment (i.e. the part after the # in protocol://server/path?query#fragment). If the content in the popup knows to check its fragment for changes, then you can pass data to it.

If it’s from the same domain then your code should work, as long as an element with that id exists.