Automatic Resize of Embedded/Inline Visualforce pages

I’m pretty sure at one time or another, most of us developers have made a sweet inline visualforce page that lives on the object detail page. Problem is since it’s all dynamic and cool we don’t know how ‘tall’ the content might end up being. We are basically stuck with having to guess at a decent height for the VF page and enable scrollbars, which kind of blows. Well not anymore (some exceptions apply)! Expanding on my previous post about using HTML5 postmessaging to move data between embedded visualforce pages and the standard salesforce domain I’ve come up with a first release of a ‘framework’ of sorts (term used very liberally). First an example. Lets check out what I’m talking about using my wordcloud app to demonstrate.

BEFORE

 

AFTER

So how did I accomplish this? The trick, as you may be able to guess by now is the HTML5 PostMessaging feature that I wrote about. By enabling communication between the frame (the visualforce page) and the parent (the detail page) it’s fairly simple to have the frame report it’s size to the parent, and have the parent adjust the height of the frame accordingly. Of course that isn’t everything my framework can do, oh no. It allows for passing of arbitrary commands/data between the two, so you can extend the functionality to pass any kind of commands/dom manipulations you might want between them. Of course the caveat is that this only works on newer browsers since postMessaging is fairly new. Also you’ll need to enable the sidebar on all pages, since that is where the proxy component lives. If you want to play with this install my alpha package from

https://login.salesforce.com/packaging/installPackage.apexp?p0=04ti0000000TY0J

Then include the home page component in the narrow/sidebar and enable the sidebar for all pages (setup->user interface->Show Custom Sidebar Components on All Pages). After that you just include these two components on any page you want to resize itself when embedded. The first component is the core piece that talks to the home page component. The second one is just some code that utilizes that framework to cause the iframe to resize. I’d put them at the bottom of your visualforce page.

<c:vfProxy />

<c:vfProxy_autoHeight />

I’m planning on possibly adding more ‘plugins’ for my framework to do other common handy things so if you have any ideas for potential plugins let me know.