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Allowing cross-site requests between subdomains without changing file contents of second sub domain

I am currently attempting to wrap a web application (ConnectWise) for inclusion within my company's central intranet site. It's a fairly simple process for the most part; create a containing page, with an iframe, point the iframe at the ConnectWise url. This part works for almost all of the functionality.
The problem comes during certain select features of the app (in this case, part of the process of creating a timesheet entry), which simply fail to work. Chrome gives the following console output.
Uncaught SecurityError: Failed to read the 'frame' property from 'Window': Blocked a frame with origin "https://app.example.com" from accessing a frame with origin "https://host.example.com". Protocols, domains, and ports must match.
I am aware this is caused by the security options for cross-site and same-origin policies. Given the following points, is there a way to overcome this?
I have full control over https://host.example.com
I can change html, javascript, and file contents
I can change IIS settings and headers
I have partial control over https://app.example.com
I can not change html, javascript, and file contents
I can change IIS settings and headers.
I have tried setting the Access-Control-Allow-Origin on each server, which so far is the only method I've come across that does not involve being able to change the file contents for the app server. This does not appear to work when given the settings (and combinations of settings) of
* or https://app.example.com while on https://host.example.com
* or https://host.example.com while on https://app.example.com
Edit:
The solution to this "duplicate" question is not applicable here. I do not have access to change file contents (including javascript) of the iframed page (app.example.com). Additionally, the script requiring the permission to run is the page within the iframe, not the page hosting the iframe.

CORS headers such as Access-Control-Allow-Origin only affect AJAX requests, not DOM access.
However, If they are both on the same domain but different subdomains then you can include the following on each page:
document.domain = 'example.com';
From MDN:
One document is allowed to access another if they have both set
document.domain to the same value, indicating their intent to
cooperate
If app.example.com has any script includes to host.example.com then you could put the above code in those scripts to set the domain.
e.g.
<script src="https://host.example.com/setup.js"></script>

No, it is not possible.
Access-Control-Allow-Origin primarily affects getting raw data from HTTP requests, not live DOMs.
postMessage can let frames on different origins communicate, but it requires JS to be included on both pages.

Cross domain / Cross browser , ajax call

Here's the scenario,
I have a main.js file in abc.com which does $.post("index.php") to access contents from the index.php from the same domain (abc.com).
This works great, as it is same domain ajax call.
But now, anyone can inlucde main.js in their website (say domain xyz.com).
Now, the path index.php (in $.post("index.php")) refers to file in domain xyz.com (not abc.com). If I put an absolute path http://www.abc.com/index.php , this does not work in some browsers (cross domain ajax restriction)
Now,
If I put headers for allow cross domain in php file, it does not work either, fails in ie 7 and below.
p.s. I need to put content in index.php file ( not in main.js ). Also, I dont want to include a php file
<script type='text/javascript' src='http://abc.com/index.php'></script>
and I would prefer not to add .js file to treat as php file in server ( so I can put php code in js file ).
The content is huge, I cannot do get request or jsonp (I think, jsonp does not allow large data)
Am I missing something ? How can I achieve this ?

You can use either JSONP or CORS to achieve this.
I've used JSONP and am going to try CORS next week. I think CORS is still asyncronous, so that might have the edge for me. At least that's my hope...

I think you need to go for server side solution. Read the file (i.e index.php) in php and save the required output to be used in a hidden field and on DOM ready You can use the data from that hidden field.

A curl request on the server side should work as well. I'd say try JSONP first, but if it wont work, go for curl request

Cross-domain website promotion

I'd like to offer a way to my users to promote my website, blog etc. on their website.
I can make a banner, logo whatever that they can embed to their site, but I'd like to offer dynamic content, like "the 5 newest entry's title from my blog".
The problem is the same origin policy. I know there is a solution (and I use it): they embed a simple div and a JavaScript file. The JS makes an XmlHttpRequest to my server and gets the data as JSONP, parses the data and inserts into the div.
But is it the only way? Isn't there a better way I could do this?
On the Internet there are tons of widget (or whatever, I don't know how they call...) that gain the data from another domain. How they do that?

A common theme of many of the solutions, instead, is getting JavaScript to call a proxy program (either on the client or the server) which, in turn, calls the web service for you.
The output can be written to the response stream and then is available, via the normal channels, such as the responseText and responseXML properties of XMLHttpRequest.
you can find more solution here :
http://developer.yahoo.com/javascript/howto-proxy.html
or here :
http://www.simple-talk.com/dotnet/asp.net/calling-cross-domain-web-services-in-ajax/

CORS is a different way than JSONP.
Plain AJAX. All your server has to do is to set a specific header: Access-Control-Allow-Origin
More here: http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/07/cross-site-xmlhttprequest-with-cors/

If you go the JSONP route, you will implicitly ask your users to trust you, as they will give you full access to the resources of their page (content, cookies,...). If they know that they main complain.
While if you go the iframe route there is no problems.One famous example today of embeddable content by iframe is the Like button of facebook.
And making that server side with a proxy or other methods would be much more complex, as there are plenty of environments out there. I don't know other ways.

You can also set the HTTP Access-Control headers in the server side. This way you're basically controlling from the server side on whether the client who has fired the XMLHttpRequest is allowed to process the response. Any recent (and decent) webbrowser will take action accordingly.
Here's a PHP-targeted example how to set the headers accordingly.
header('Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *'); // Everone may process the response.
header('Access-Control-Max-Age: 604800'); // Client may cache this for one week.
header('Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET, POST'); // Allowed request methods.
The key is Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *. This informs the client that requests originating from * (in fact, everywhere) is allowed to process the response. If you set it to for example Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://example.com, then the webbrowser may only process the response when the initial page is been served from the mentioned domain.
See also:
MDC - HTTP Access Control

A question about cross-domain (subdomain) ajax request

Let's say I have the main page loaded from http://www.example.com/index.html. On that page there is js code that makes an ajax request to http://n1.example.com//echo?message=hello. When the response is received a div on the main page is updated with the response body.
Will that work on all popular browsers?
Edit:
The obvious solution is to put a proxy in front of www.example.com and n1.example.com and set it so that every request going to a subresource of http://www.example.com/n1 gets proxied to http://n1.example.com/.

Cross domain is entirely a different subject. But cross sub-domain is relatively easy. All you need to do is to set the document.domain to be same in both the parent page and the iframe page.
document.domain = "yourdomain.com"
More info here
Note: this technique will only let you interact with iframes from parents of your domain. It does not alter the Origin sent by XMLHttpRequest.

All modern browsers support CORS and henceforth we should leverage this addition.
It works on simple handshaking technique were the 2 domains communicating trust each other by way of HTTP headers sent/received. This was long awaited as same origin policy was necessary to avoid XSS and other malicious attempts.
To initiate a cross-origin request, a browser sends the request with an Origin HTTP header. The value of this header is the site that served the page. For example, suppose a page on http://www.example-social-network.com attempts to access a user's data in online-personal-calendar.com. If the user's browser implements CORS, the following request header would be sent:
Origin: http://www.example-social-network.com
If online-personal-calendar.com allows the request, it sends an Access-Control-Allow-Origin header in its response. The value of the header indicates what origin sites are allowed. For example, a response to the previous request would contain the following:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://www.example-social-network.com
If the server does not allow the cross-origin request, the browser will deliver an error to example-social-network.com page instead of the online-personal-calendar.com response.
To allow access to all pages, a server can send the following response header:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
However, this might not be appropriate for situations in which security is a concern.
Very well explained here in below wiki page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-origin_resource_sharing

Another solution that may or may not work for you is to dynamically insert/remove script tags in your DOM that point to the target domain. This will work if the target returns json and supports a callback.
Function to handle the result:
<script type="text/javascript">
function foo(result) {
alert( result );
}
</script>
Instead of doing an AJAX request you would dynamically insert something like this:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://n1.example.com/echo?callback=foo"></script>

Another workaround, is to direct the ajax request to a php (for example) page on your domain, and in that page make a cURL request to the subdomain.

The simplest solution I found was to create a php on your subdomain and include your original function file within it using a full path.
Example:
www.domain.com/ajax/this_is_where_the_php_is_called.php
Subdomain:
sub.domain.com
Create:
sub.domain.com/I_need_the_function.php
Inside I_need_the_function.php just use an include:
include_once("/server/path/public_html/ajax/this_is_where_the_php_is_called.php");
Now call sub.domain.com/I_need_the_function.php from your javascript.
var sub="";
switch(window.location.hostname)
{
case "www.domain.com":
sub = "/ajax/this_is_where_the_php_is_called.php";
break;
case "domain.com":
sub = "";
break;
default: ///your subdomain (or add more "case" 's)
sub = "/I_need_the_function.php";
}
xmlHttp.open("GET",sub,true);
The example is as simple as I can make it. You may want to use better formatted paths.
I hope this helps some one. Nothing messy here - and you are calling the original file, so any edits will apply to all functions.

New idea: if you want cross subdomain (www.domain.com and sub.domain.com) and you are working on apache. things can get a lot easier. if a subdomain actually is a subdirectory in public_html (sub.domain.com = www.domain.com/sub/. so if you have ajax.domain.com/?request=subject...you can do something like this: www.domain.com/ajax/?request=subject
works like a charm for me, and no stupid hacks, proxies or difficult things to do for just a few Ajax requests!

I wrote a solution for cross sub domain and its been working for my applications. I used iframe and setting document.domain="domain.com" on both sides. You can find my solution at :
https://github.com/emphaticsunshine/Cross-sub-domain-solution

"Access is denied" error on accessing iframe document object

For posting AJAX forms in a form with many parameters, I am using a solution of creating an iframe, posting the form to it by POST, and then accessing the iframe's content.
specifically, I am accessing the content like this:
$("some_iframe_id").get(0).contentWindow.document
I tested it and it worked.
On some of the pages, I started getting an "Access is denied" error. As far as I know, this shouldn't happen if the iframe is served from the same domain.
I'm pretty sure it was working before. Anybody have a clue?
If I'm not being clear enough: I'm posting to the same domain. So this is not a cross-domain request. I am testing on IE only.
P.S. I can't use simple ajax POST queries (don't ask...)

Solved it by myself!
The problem was, that even though the correct response was being sent (verified with Fiddler), it was being sent with an HTTP 500 error code (instead of 200).
So it turns out, that if a response is sent with an error code, IE replaces the content of the iframe with an error message loaded from the disk (res://ieframe.dll/http_500.htm), and that causes the cross-domain access denied error.

Beware of security limitations associated to iFrames, like Cross domain restriction (aka CORS). Below are 3 common errors related to CORS :
Load an iFrame with a different domain. (Ex: opening "www.foo.com" while top frame is "www.ooof.com")
Load an iFrame with a different port: iFrame's URL port differs from the one of the top frame.
Different protocols : loading iFrame resource via HTTPS while parent Frame uses HTTP.

My issue was the X-Frame-Options HTTP header. My Apache configuration has it set to:
Header always append X-Frame-Options DENY
Removing it allowed it to work. Specifically in my case I was using iframe transport for jQuery with the jQuery file upload plugin to upload files in IE 9 and IE 10.

I know this question is super-old, but I wanted to mention that the above answer worked for me: setting the document.domain to be the same on each of the pages-- the parent page and the iframe page. However in my search, I did find this interesting article:
http://softwareas.com/cross-domain-communication-with-iframes

Note if you have a iframe with src='javascript:void(0)' then javascript like frame.document.location =... will fail with Access Denied error in IE. Was using a javascript library that interacts with a target frame. Even though the location it was trying to change the frame to was on the same domain as parent, the iframe was initially set to javascript:void which triggered the cross domain access denied error.
To solve this I created a blank.html page in my site and if I need to declare an iframe in advance that will initially be blank until changed via javascript, then I point it to the blank page so that src='/content/blank.html' is in the same domain.
Alternatively you could create the iframe completely through javascript so that you can set the src when it is created, but in my case I was using a library which reqired an iframe already be declared on the page.

Basically, this error occurs when the document in frame and outside of ii have different domains. So to prevent cross-side scripting browsers disable such execution.

if it is a domain issue (or subdomain) such as www.foo.com sending a request to www.api.foo.com
on each page you can set the
document.domain = www.foo.com
to allow for "cross-domain" permissions