Whew… that title was almost as long as the variable name I’m about to throw out in a code example.

I spent well over an hour beating my head against the wall on this problem today before narrowing it down to a Gravity Forms issue. The scenario: I have a site that is loading iframes from a different subdomain. As is common in this situation, I wanted to be able to adjust the height of the iframe with JavaScript, to match the height of the page within the iframe and prevent internal scrollbars.

The solution to that problem is readily available on teh interwebz, with the addition of a bit of extra JavaScript to allow cross-site scripting: both the containing page and the contained page need to specify the same document.domain so browsers will let them talk to each other.

Not long after we put this in place, my client informed me that none of their AJAX-based Gravity Forms were working. The spinner would just spin indefinitely, even if (usually) the form actually did submit properly. It didn’t take me long to narrow the problem down to a JavaScript error pertaining to cross-site scripting. I found that AJAX and document.domain don’t mix. Or at least that seemed to be the issue.

But that’s where I hit a wall. No one else seemed to be describing the exact problem I was having. Most solutions involved adding a Access-Control-Allow-Origin header, but that didn’t do anything for me.

Eventually I realized that was because the problem wasn’t with the AJAX, per se. It was the fact that Gravity Forms adds its own hidden iframe where it works some secret mojo on AJAX submissions. And that iframe needed to have document.domain added to it, just like my site and the other subdomain I was loading in iframes did.

So the question then was, is there a Gravity Forms hook to modify its iframe output? Fortunately, the answer is yes.

The gform_ajax_iframe_content filter pretty much does what it says on the tin. Add a filter to insert the necessary JavaScript, and you’re good. The only thing I don’t get about this is the name given to its lone input parameter. I mean, really? (Actually… I do think I understand it, but I don’t understand it.)

Anyway… here’s what you need to make this work. Just replace example.com with the correct domain name. And if you’re running on a version of PHP before 5.3, you won’t be able to use an anonymous function. But you’re not running an old version of PHP, are you?

add_filter('gform_ajax_iframe_content', function($doctype_html_html_head_meta_charset_utf_8_head_body_class_gf_ajax_postback_form_string_body_html) {
  echo "<script>document.domain = 'example.com';</script>\n";
  return $doctype_html_html_head_meta_charset_utf_8_head_body_class_gf_ajax_postback_form_string_body_html;
});