Remote Scripting - Introduction

for IE 5+ and Netscape 6+

Back in 2001, I was developing an order form for trading stocks. One of the requirements was that the name of the security and its price quote should appear in the page when the user entered the security symbol. And if the user changed the symbol the new name and quote should replace the old. Oh, and they didn't want the page to reload.

Since the users would all be using IE 5+ I decided that the best way to do this would be to target the quote request to a hidden iframe and display the results when they came back in the parent.

It worked like a charm and I thought I was so clever. What I didn't know was that my solution already had a name - remote scripting.

 

Remote Scripting

Remote scripting is a technique in which you make a form request to a database, target the results to a hidden frame and then display the response in another page. Apple has a very thorough explanation of it on their developer site which I recommend reading.

This tutorial describes a slightly different implementation of remote scripting than Apple's tutorial so there shouldn't be too much duplication of the Apple material. This tutorial is also, by necessity, longer than the other lessons on this site, and will consist of 5 parts :

• Targeting a Hidden iframe
• Moving Data From an iframe to the Parent
• Moving Object Level Data Across Frames
• Adjusting Your History
• Access Denied

Targeting a Hidden iframe >>

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PXL8 2003