Cannot appendChild() to a newly opened window

[Michael Lee]

Does anyone know why the following function works in FireFox but not in IE6?

function ShowTable()
{
clonedNode = document.getEle mentById("myTab le").cloneNode( true);
win = window.open();
win.document.bo dy.appendChild( clonedNode);
}

I am trying to display a table with id="myTable" in a new window. IE6
complains that "document.b ody" is null or not an object.

Thanks!

Michael Lee

[Martin Honnen]

Michael Lee wrote:

Does anyone know why the following function works in FireFox but not in IE6?

function ShowTable()
{
clonedNode = document.getEle mentById("myTab le").cloneNode( true);
win = window.open();
win.document.bo dy.appendChild( clonedNode);
}

First window.open() doesn't load any document, and even if you used
window.open('wh atever.html')
the loading of the document would happen asynchronously and the next
line is executed without waiting for the document to load so directly
accessing
win.document.bo dy
is not going to work reliably and consistently.
Furthermore IE doesn't allow you to take nodes from one document and
insert them into another document. Nor does Opera. The W3C DOM suggests
to use importNode and Opera and Mozilla implement that. For IE you are
left with implementing that yourself or using innerHTML/outerHTML and/or
insertAdjacentH TML.
The solution to your window access is probably to load a page with
window.open that in its onload handler copies the table from the opener
window's document.
--

Martin Honnen
http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/

[Myron Turner]

While you may not be able to direclty append a node from one wndow to
the other, there is a work-around, which I've used in:
http://www.room535.org/news/
You can transfer a reference (or array of references) to the nodes in
window 1 to window 2, as follows.

------------------------------------------
In Window 1:

var toWin = top.opener;
toWin.getNodesF romWindow_1(nod e_arry);

------------------------------------------------------------

In Window 2:
What you do in Window 2 will depend on what you want to do with the
node, but this is a stripped down idea of what's involved. The
function cloneExternalNo de(n,parent) is key to the transfer; it
creates a new node from the node reference obtained from Window 1 and
then you can do what you want with it.

var mainDiv; //needs to be defined
getNodesFromWin dow_1(nodes) {
for(var i=0; i < nodes.length; i++) {
// pass parent, if exits or else null
var clone = cloneExternalNo de(n,parent);
mainDiv.appendC hild(clone);
}
}

function cloneExternalNo de(n,parent)
{
if(n.nodeType == 3) {
var newNode = document.create TextNode(n.data );
}
else {
var newNode = document.create Element(n.nodeN ame);
var att = n.attributes;
setcloneAttribu tes(newNode, att);
}
if(parent) parent.appendCh ild(newNode);

var children = n.childNodes;
for(var j=0; j<children.leng th; j++) {
cloneExternalNo de(children[j], newNode);
}

return newNode;
}

On Fri, 02 Jul 2004 19:49:25 +0200, Martin Honnen <ma*******@yaho o.de>
wrote:

Michael Lee wrote:

Does anyone know why the following function works in FireFox but not in IE6?

function ShowTable()
{
clonedNode = document.getEle mentById("myTab le").cloneNode( true);
win = window.open();
win.document.bo dy.appendChild( clonedNode);
}

First window.open() doesn't load any document, and even if you used
window.open('wh atever.html')
the loading of the document would happen asynchronously and the next
line is executed without waiting for the document to load so directly
accessing
win.document.bo dy
is not going to work reliably and consistently.
Furthermore IE doesn't allow you to take nodes from one document and
insert them into another document. Nor does Opera. The W3C DOM suggests
to use importNode and Opera and Mozilla implement that. For IE you are
left with implementing that yourself or using innerHTML/outerHTML and/or
insertAdjacent HTML.
The solution to your window access is probably to load a page with
window.open that in its onload handler copies the table from the opener
window's document.
--

Martin Honnen
http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/

Myron Turner
www.room535.org