Javascript callback when IFRAME is finished loading?

First up, going by the function name xssRequest it sounds like you're trying cross site request - which if that's right, you're not going to be able to read the contents of the iframe.

On the other hand, if the iframe's URL is on your domain you can access the body, but I've found that if I use a timeout to remove the iframe the callback works fine:

// possibly excessive use of jQuery - but I've got a live working example in production
$('#myUniqueID').load(function () {
  if (typeof callback == 'function') {
    callback($('body', this.contentWindow.document).html());
  }
  setTimeout(function () {$('#frameId').remove();}, 50);
});

I am using jQuery and surprisingly this seems to load as I just tested and loaded a heavy page and I didn't get the alert for a few seconds until I saw the iframe load:

$('#the_iframe').load(function(){
    alert('loaded!');
});

So if you don't want to use jQuery take a look at their source code and see if this function behaves differently with iframe DOM elements, I will look at it myself later as I am interested and post here. Also I only tested in the latest chrome.

I have had to do this in cases where documents such as word docs and pdfs were being streamed to the iframe and found a solution that works pretty well. The key is handling the onreadystatechanged event on the iframe.

Lets say the name of your frame is "myIframe". First somewhere in your code startup (I do it inline any where after the iframe) add something like this to register the event handler:

document.getElementById('myIframe').onreadystatechange = MyIframeReadyStateChanged;

I was not able to use an onreadystatechage attribute on the iframe, I can't remember why, but the app had to work in IE 7 and Safari 3, so that may of been a factor.

Here is an example of a how to get the complete state:

function MyIframeReadyStateChanged()
{
    if(document.getElementById('myIframe').readyState == 'complete')
    {
        // Do your complete stuff here.
    }
}