Get HTML element by position

Question

I am using TWebBrowser in Delphi. I need help to get an HTML element by its position.

The element I need is in a frame. Using elementFromPoint():

Document.elementFromPoint(X, Y)

I am getting the frame itself, but not what is inside of it.

I tried to get it using this:

WebBrowser.OleObject.Document.Frames

But this gives me an access error when transferring frames.

Answer 1

Using Document.elementFromPoint() is the correct approach. What you are not taking into account is that the HTML is parsed in a hierarchical DOM tree and elementFromPoint() is not recursive.

You are asking the browser's top-level Document to find an immediate child element at a given X,Y coordinate within the Document. In this case, that is a frame element.

A frame is an embedded window that holds another Document. You need to access the frame's Document and ask it to find a child element at the target X,Y coordinate within the frame. And so on, and so on, until you finally reach the bottom-most child.

Note that elementFromPoint() takes client coordinates that are relative to the top-left corner of the Document you are calling elementFromPoint() on. So, when you want to search a child frame's Document, you need to first subtract the frame's own top-left X,Y coordinate (within its parent Document) from the target X,Y coordinate before calling elementFromPoint() on the frame's Document.