Auto Resize iFrames - Part 1

At times you may need to load content from other domains or websites into a web application that you are creating. One of the most common ways to accomplish this is to use an iFrame to load the content (this is assuming that you just want to display a web page in your application). In some cases you will want to load content and have the iFrame re-size based on the content that is being loaded into the iFrame.

The interesting thing is that there is no easy way to do this. You can't set the iFrame's width and height properties to 100% as this will have the iFrame take over the screen and not just re-size based on content. The solution that I came up with is the use of a server side proxy (which gets around cross-domain issues) and some javascript that is added from the server side proxy code to re-size the iFrame.

This first post will give you an idea on how this would be accomplished. In my next post I'll talk about the code that would be used and discuss the pros and cons (as well as other methods that could be used to accomplish the same effect). So make sure to check your feed reader for the next post...