Question

I’ve got a piece of JavaScript that inserts/removes an iframe from the DOM. Everything is dandy in Chrome and FireFox but the iframe is not displayed in IE. The code below is the creation and insertion. When inspecting with a Developer tools I can see that the iframe is part of the DOM exactly as I expected it to be. Any suggestion on what might cause it not to be displayed?

function getiFrame(target) {
   var frame = document.getElementById(target);
   if (null == frame) {
       frame = document.createElement("iframe");
       frame.setAttribute("width", "100%");
       frame.setAttribute("height", "1000px");
       //frame.setAttribute("frameborder", "0");
       frame.setAttribute("id", target);
       frame.setAttribute("name", target);
       frame.setAttribute("src", "http://dmi.dk");
   } else {
       frame.src = "http://dmi.dk";
       frame.style.visibility = "visible";
   }

   return frame;
}

var frame = getiFrame(target);
var row = document.getElementById(contentRowId);
for (var i = 0; row.childNodes.length > 0; i++) {
         row.removeChild(row.childNodes[0]);
}

row.appendChild(frame);

EDIT:
To clarify I’ve tryed setting the attributes directly (as suggested by Tim Down) the above was the result of my desperate attempts.

Further when inspecting the DOM I get a perfectly valid iframe tag:

<iframe propdescname="full" width="100%" height="1000" id="full" src="http://dmi.dk">

and inspecting that also shows that it’s read and parsed the src (http://dmi.dk) correctly. I can inspect the DOM of that site too.

So what puzzles me is that when everything seems to work. What might stop it from being displayed.

Answer 1

Jim Coplien referres to this as the Rubber Duck pattern. “You cannot ask xx before You’ve consulted the rubber duck”. Who hasn’t solved there own question while asking some one for advice.

I’was editing my post writing that the iframe was in a td and came to think that I hadn’t made sure it actually was. The issue turned out to be me removing the td and inserting the iframe into the tr which IE incidentally handles differently when done dynamically than when done statically.

Thanks for listening in, playing the role of “the rubber duck”