IFRAME and Amazon Product Feed:

2004-06-04T21:46:25-08:00

How to display inline searches in your templates and pagesA Newbie Tutorial On my HTML pages I figured out how to use SSI to display the results of amazon_product_feed searches on my web pages. However, Neither the SSI or PHP methods described in the documentation will work if placed within the templates. I've got this great sidebar in my page design but very few of the useful Amazon Product Feed variables are available at the page template level. What to do? There are two HTML options and . These are fairly well supported on the more popular browsers, though OBJECT is the only one of the two specified in the HTML 4.0 standards. Nonetheless, I went with IFRAME for some of its more useful features. ]]>

So we have a child frame appearing in the parent window with the following configuration An IFRAME named "sidebar" (we'll be using that later), that will hopefully force itself to display at the top of the sidebar it's transparent so whatever colour our sidebar is will show through as wide as the parent sidebar (less 4 pixel margins on each side) will automatically put up scroll bars if there's more data than fits in the frame. won't have a border because we already have one in the parent sidebar. browsers which don't support IFRAMES will display the message instead. Nifty. Now inside that IFRAME is a call to the APF script. This call will perform a similarity search on the current value for %%Asin%%. It's calling a special 'heavy' version of the script which I've lightly hacked in order to get the "heavy" data from AWS, in order to display %%Director%% and %%Starring%% information when available. There's more to this call, but we'll get back to that. For now, let's finish off the IFRAME implementation. Resizable IFRAMEs We've configured our IFRAME to be 750 pixels in height. That's fine when you know how much data the search will return, but we don't. In order to make it resizable, we have to get the IFRAME window and its parent window to have a conversation. "Hey Dad!" "Yes, son?" "I need to be T H I S B I G !!!" Except they're going to talk in javascript. There's a simple example of this here found on this page. I'd save you all the digging, but the code's Terms of Use prevent me from redistributing it. Instead, I'll tell you what you need to do. First, view the source code of this page and find the line

My Messy Workbench: Toolbox

Amazon Products Feed: Display the Most Popular Items

IFRAME and Amazon Product Feed: