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Detect failure to load contents of an iframe

Asked 2008-12-17T19:20:59.470
70

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.

javascript html firefox-addon frames xulrunner
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2 Answers

13

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.

answered 2008-12-17T19:38:50.243
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.

answered 2009-10-09T20:02:42.857

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