In this use case, I have a form with an embedded Iframe.  In the Iframe, I have a small webform that is continuously recycling to update the status of a patch staging/download task.

When I was developing this form for a Patch Management POC, this is where I left it.  However, today I rethought the functionality after some research into this question on Symantec Connect authored by upioneer:

I am trying to leverage panel visibility (or any variable for that matter), using the current state of an Ajax component. Trouble is, there doesn’t seem to be any output variable for the Ajax component.

After way too much research and mucking about in the AjaxLabels, I finally gave up on that and tried to find a way to use an Iframe panel method in a way that would solve his issue.  What I landed on was this post on Stack Exchange, which indicated that prefixing the controlid-grab in javascript with “parent” would shift out to the Iframe‘s parent context and look for the control id there.

After a bit of testing, this is what I came up with as a concept proof for upioneer:

I haven’t heard back yet on whether that helped him find success and celebration, (turns out it didn’t help him very much) but this discovery led me to epiphany.  My original Patch project involves an external validation model which runs a staging task status check and returns to the form if the staging is incomplete, along with an error message.  These are a lot of unnecessary steps, since we can just keep the button hidden until the Iframe says it’s time to come out.

I added a body “onload” event action to the form that shows the “Patch is staged and ready” message.  The script for that:

parent.document.getElementById('ButtonCommit1').className = 'gcButton1';

where the id “ButtonCommit1” is the “Next” button on the parent form.  The original css class for the button is simply:

.gcHiddenElement {
visibility: hidden;
}

and applying the ‘gcButton1’ class then shows the Button and styles it.

Here’s the result of the updated code:

So, thanks upioneer for the inspiration.  I hope it helps someone else as well.

Update: It turns out this also affects and works for subdialog virtual windows.

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Iframe

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