Is there a way to have content from an IFRAME overflow onto the parent frame?

Question

I have a UI widget that needs to be put in an IFRAME both for performance reasons and so we can syndicate it out to affiliate sites easily. The UI for the widget includes tool-tips that display over the top of other page content. See screenshot below or go to the site to see it in action. Is there any way to make content from within the IFRAME overlap the parent frame's content?

Answer 1

No it's not possible. Ignoring any historical reasons, nowadays it would be considered a security vulnerability -- eg. many sites put untrusted content into iframes (the iframe source being a different origin so cannot modify the parent frame, per the same origin policy).

If such untrusted content had a mechanism to place content outside of the bounds of the iframe it could (for example) place an "identical" login div (or whatever) over a parent frame's real login fields, and could thus steal username/password information. Which would suck.

Answer 2

I couldn't find a way to make the content of the frame flow out of the frame, but I did find a way to hack around it, by moving the tooltip into the parent document and placing it above (z-index) the iframe.

The approach was:
1) find the iframe in the parent document
2) remove the tooltip element from where it is in the DOM, and add it to the parent document inside the element that contains your iframe.
3) you probably need to adjust the z-index and positioning, depending on how you were doing that in the first place.

You can access the parent document of an iframe using parent.document.

 jQuery(tooltip).remove(); var iframeParent = jQuery("#the_id_of_the_iframe", parent.document)[0].parentNode; iframeParent.appendChild(tooltip); //adjust z-index, positioning