Detect failure to load contents of an iframe

Question

I can detect when the content of an iframe has loaded using the load event. Unfortunately, for my purposes, there are two problems with this:

• If there is an error loading the page (404/500, etc), the load event is never fired.
• If some images or other dependencies failed to load, the load event is fired as usual.

Is there some way I can reliably determine if either of the above errors occurred?

I'm writing a semi-web semi-desktop application based on Mozilla/XULRunner, so solutions that only work in Mozilla are welcome.

Answer 1

I think that the pageshow event is fired for error pages. Or if you're doing this from chrome, then your check your progress listener's request to see if it's an HTTP channel in which case you can retrieve the status code.

As for page dependencies, I think you can only do this from chrome by adding a capturing onerror event listener, and even then it will only find errors in elements, not CSS backgrounds or other images.

Answer 2

Doesn't answer your question exactly, but my search for an answer brought me here, so I'm posting just in case anyone else had a similar query to me.

It doesn't quite use a load event, but it can detect whether a website is accessible and callable (if it is, then the iFrame, in theory, should load).

At first, I thought to do an AJAX call like everyone else, except that it didn't work for me initially, as I had used jQuery. It works perfectly if you do a XMLHttpRequest:

var url = http://url_to_test.com/
var xhttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
xhttp.onreadystatechange = function() {
    if (this.readyState == 4 && this.status != 200) {
        console.log("iframe failed to load");
    }
};
xhttp.open("GET", url, true);
xhttp.send();

Edit:
So this method works ok, except that it has a lot of false negatives (picks up a lot of stuff that would display in an iframe) due to cross-origin malarky. The way that I got around this was to do a CURL/Web request on a server, and then check the response headers for a) if the website exists, and b) if the headers had set x-frame-options.

This isn't a problem if you run your own webserver, as you can make your own api call for it.

My implementation in node.js:

app.get('/iframetest',function(req,res){ //Call using /iframetest?url=url - needs to be stripped of http:// or https://
   var url = req.query.url; 
    var request = require('https').request({host: url}, function(response){ //This does an https request - require('http') if you want to do a http request
        var headers = response.headers;
        if (typeof headers["x-frame-options"] != 'undefined') {
            res.send(false); //Headers don't allow iframe
        } else {
            res.send(true); //Headers don't disallow iframe
        }
    });
    request.on('error',function(e){
       res.send(false); //website unavailable
    });
    request.end();
});

Answer 3

I had this problem recently and had to resort to setting up a Javascript Polling action on the Parent Page (that contains the IFRAME tag). This JavaScript function checks the IFRAME's contents for explicit elements that should only exist in a GOOD response. This assumes of course that you don't have to deal with violating the "same origin policy."

Instead of checking for all possible errors which might be generated from the many different network resources.. I simply checked for the one constant positive Element(s) that I know should be in a good response.

After a pre-determined time and/or # of failed attempts to detect the expected Element(s), the JavaScript modifies the IFRAME's SRC attribute (to request from my Servlet) a User Friendly Error Page as opposed to displaying the typical HTTP ERROR message. The JavaScript could also just as easily modify the SRC attribute to make an entirely different request.

function checkForContents(){
var contents=document.getElementById('myiframe').contentWindow.document
if(contents){
    alert('found contents of myiframe:' + contents);
    if(contents.documentElement){
        if(contents.documentElement.innerHTML){
            alert("Found contents: " +contents.documentElement.innerHTML);
            if(contents.documentElement.innerHTML.indexOf("FIND_ME") > -1){
                openMediumWindow("woot.html", "mypopup");
            }
        }
    }
}

}

Answer 4

If you have control over the iframe page (and the pages are on the same domain name), a strategy could be as follows:

• In the parent document, initialize a variable var iFrameLoaded = false;
• When the iframe document is loaded, set this variable in the parent to true calling from the iframe document a parent's function (setIFrameLoaded(); for example).
• check the iFrameLoaded flag using the timer object (set the timer to your preferred timeout limit) - if the flag is still false you can tell that the iframe was not regularly loaded.

I hope this helps.

Answer 5

Have a id for the top most (body) element in the page that is being loaded in your iframe.

on the Load handler of your iframe, check to see if getElementById() returns a non null value. If it is, iframe has loaded successfully. else it has failed.

in that case, put frame.src="about:blank". Make sure to remove the loadhandler before doing that.