Can't dynamically add rows to a <TABLE> in IE?
Solution 1:
You need to create a TBODY element to add your new TR to and then add the TBODY to your table, like this:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><title></title></head><body>
<table id="employeetable">
<tr>
<th>Name</th>
<th>Job</th>
</tr>
</table>
<script type="text/javascript">
function addEmployee(employeeName, employeeJob) {
var tableElement = document.getElementById("employeetable");
if (tableElement) {
var newTable = document.createElement('tbody'); // New
var newRow = document.createElement("tr");
var nameCell = document.createElement("td");
var jobCell = document.createElement("td");
nameCell.appendChild(document.createTextNode(employeeName));
jobCell.appendChild(document.createTextNode(employeeJob));
newRow.appendChild(nameCell);
newRow.appendChild(jobCell);
newTable.appendChild(newRow); // New
tableElement.appendChild(newTable); // New
alert("code executed!");
}
}
setTimeout("addEmployee(\"Bob Smith\", \"CEO\");", 1000);
setTimeout("addEmployee(\"John Franks\", \"Vice President\");", 2000);
setTimeout("addEmployee(\"Jane Doe\", \"Director of Marketing\");", 3000);
</script>
</body></html>
Solution 2:
Apparently, in IE you need to append your row to the TBody element, not the Table element... See discussion at Ruby-Forum.
Expanding on the discussion there, the <table> markup is generally done without explicit <thead> and <tbody> markup, but the <tbody> ELEMENT is where you actually need to add your new row, as <table> does not contain <tr> elements directly.
Solution 3:
Edit: now works in IE! insertSiblingNodesAfter uses the parentNode of the sibling, which happens to be a tbody in IE
It's hard to know what quirks are in store when you try to manipulate the DOM cross-browser. I'd recommend that you use an existing library that has been fully tested across all major browsers, and accounts for quirks.
Personally I use MochiKit, you can dive into DOM manipulation here: http://mochikit.com/doc/html/MochiKit/DOM.html
Your final function might look something like this:
function addEmployee(employeeName, employeeJob) {
var trs = getElementsByTagAndClassName("tr", null, "employeetable");
insertSiblingNodesAfter(trs[trs.length-1], TR({}, TD({}, employeeName), TD({}, employeeJob));
alert("code executed!");
}