iframe-autoheight

Snippet which uses postMessage to automatically set the height of an iframe to fit the height of the page inside it. Requires you to add a script to the page inside the iframe.

https://github.com/andfinally/iframe-autoheight

How to use

• Copy the two scripts iframe-autoheight-parent.min.js and iframe-autoheight-child.min.js and the stylesheet iframe-autoheight.css from the dist folder to your server.
• Change permittedOrigin in iframe-autoheight-parent.min.js to the hostname of the page inside the iframe. For example, if the URL of the child page is https://mysite.com/content, permittedOrigin should be https://mysite.com. You can do this by running gulp and modifying src/scripts/iframe-autoheight-child.es, or change it in the minified JS file directly.
• Include iframe-autoheight-parent.min.js and iframe-autoheight.css in the parent page that contains the iframe.
• Include iframe-autoheight-child.min.js in the child page inside the iframe.
• Ensure your iframe has a name attribute and give it the class iframe-autoheight. I also recommend scrolling and frameborder attributes like in this example: <iframe src="content.html" name="nom" class="iframe-autoheight" scrolling="no" frameborder="0"></iframe>

How it works

• The script in the page inside the iframe sends a postMessage to the parent page on DOMContentLoaded or on load, and also whenever it's resized.
• The script in the parent page adjusts the height of the iframe to fit the height of the document element in the child page.

Requirements

• Iframe must have a name attribute.
• Iframe must have class attribute iframe-autoheight to take on the simple styles defined in iframe-autoheight.css.
• Iframe should have scrolling attribute no.
• event.origin in the parent page must match the origin of the page in the iframe.

Page loading

• The script in the parent page needs to be parsed before the one in the page inside the iframe. If the parent page has a lot of slow-loading content you may find you need to place the parent script higher up in the loading order of the page, for example in the head element.

Improvements

• We should add top and bottom margins to the calculation of height in iframe-autoheight-child.es.
• We could optimise the parent script by splitting it into two, one small part caching all postMessages received, and the other processing the cached messages once it's loaded.

Demo and development

• gulp to start a watch process which transpiles the ES6 and SASS files in src and copies the resulting files to the dev and dist folders.
• gulp start to run the build, start serving the demo at http://localhost:8087, and start the watch process.