Update inline s-control height dynamically

Salesforce.com recently released the functionality allowing us to place s-controls directly on page layouts just like any other standard or custom fields.

Having the ability to embed s-controls on a page layout allows us to add some pretty cool functionality to the standard page layouts (Charts, graphs, images, behind the scenes business logic, etc). Something that was severely lacking previously.

Part of the process of adding the s-control to the page layout is defining the height of that s-control. Which is really the height setting of the Iframe that the s-control is loaded into. If you do not specify a height then it is defaulted to 200px.




But what if your s-control should be different height based on different factors? Lets refer back to our previous post "Use Google charts to add visual elements to Salesforce.com data". In this post we showed how you could roll up unit sales information from a related list into a Google Chart and then display that in an inline s-control at the top of a page layout which is 150px high.



This is great if the account has unit sales, but what if there is no unit sales for that account? Then the charts would just be blank.



To save real-estate we can dynamically set the s-control height from within and if there is no unit sales to display then shrink the height to 25px and display a simple message.

"There are no Unit Sales for this account to display"

So how do you dynamically control an s-control's height from within? It is actually very simple. To completely understand lets walk through how the s-control is rendered on the page. As I stated earlier when the s-control is loaded it is actually pulled into an Iframe on the page. The name and id tag of this Iframe are the s-control's Id.

<Iframe height="200px" id="{!SControl.Id}" Name="{!SControl.Name}>

So all we have to do is adjust the Iframe's height based on weather unit sales are present. Below is the sample code to accomplish this. This code assumes that the "unitSales" variable has already been determined.

if(unitSales = 0) {

var hgt = 25;

/// Display no Unit Sales message

} else {

var hgt = 150;

// Display graphs

}


/// Get the current Iframe and store in an object
var sframe=top.document.getElementById(window.name);

// Set the height to the passed value.
sframe.style.height= hgt + "px";

Using the last lines of this code you can dynamically adjust the height of any inline s-control you display on your page.