Help! Please Help!

dreamsofshadow

This may seem like an idiotic question, but its been driving me mad for about an hour and half now. Im trying to find the document.getElementById("divaa").style.top
for an element, but all i ever get is " " returned, except with div's that don't have position:absolute; top:100; left:100 ...etc designated in their style class's. I dont know what the hell is going on and its driving me crazy

some examples of code:

var seop = gettopnum("divaa");
/ this works if i pass the "movera" div, but not the "divaa" div. the only difference between the two that i could see is that one has its top style defined within the style sheet and the other not. /

function gettopnum(gods)
{
var god = document.getElementById(gods);
var ctop = god.style.top;
alert(ctop); //at which ctop is returned as being " "
var tt = ctop.indexOf('p');
ctop = ctop.substr(0, tt);
ctop = Number(ctop);
return ctop;
}

JPnyc

You can't access CSS attribute values that way. You have to use 2 methods, 1 for IE and 1 for everything else. getComputedStyle() is the standard method, currentStyle() is the MS method.

Here's a tutorial on one and here's a tutorial on the other

goldbug

Actually, you can access attributes in that manner, but only if the attribute is defined inline on the element, for example:

... should allow element.style.top to work, but...

... will get you nowhere. Look into getComputedStyle and currentStyle as JPnyc said.

JPnyc

Yes, you can access inline styles that way, but since his wasn't working, I assumed they weren't inline. You can also access HTML attribute values that way (minus style) however obviously absolute positioning isn't an HTML attribute.

goldbug

Because I'm in a semi-helpful mood today, I dug this up:

function getCSSProp (element, prop) {
  if (element.style[prop]) {
    // inline style property
    return element.style[prop];
  } else if (element.currentStyle) {
    // external stylesheet for Explorer
    return element.currentStyle[prop];
  } else if (document.defaultView && document.defaultView.getComputedStyle) {
    // external stylesheet for Mozilla and Safari 1.3+
    prop = prop.replace(/([A-Z])/g,"-$1");
    prop = prop.toLowerCase();
    return document.defaultView.getComputedStyle(element,"").getPropertyValue(prop);
  } else {
    // others
    return null;
  }
}

dreamsofshadow

Thanks for the help guys. I ended up fixing my problem a few minutes after i posted here with pure brute force programming, but left it up so i could figure out what was wrong. I ended up just passing variables from an earlier function that forwarded php driven coordinants, which were then passed to a javascript function that set the values to global variables such as "selectelementtop" and "selectelementleft." From here i just manipulated the quardinants along with the actual positions.

         p.s I taught myself how to program, and thats why i ask stupid questions.