Navigating in an IE Modal Dialog

Internet Explorer has a nice feature where a new window can be opened modally using the window.showModalDialog function, meaning that the page that opened it cannot be accessed until the new window is closed. This can be useful in many situations.

However, the main limitation of IE Modal Dialogs (other than being non-standard), is that any hyperlink clicked in a modal dialog causes another, non modal, dialog to be opened, rather than opening the page linked to in the same window, as would happen in a normal pop up window.

The key to solving this problem is to note that a modal dialog only opens another window when a GET request is made, not when a POST request is made. However, an anchor tag automatically causes a GET request, so the solution is to:

1. Catch the click on each anchor tag, cancel it,
2. Submit a dynamically created FORM element, with it’s method set to ‘POST’ and it’s action set to the URL of the link clicked.

While it is possible to put a listener on each anchor tag to achieve this, such an approach will not scale well. Instead, place a listener on the body tag. The example below is done using methods from the Dojo Ajax Toolkit, since that the toolkit I use the most, but you can of course use whatever methods you like to achieve the same result:

<script type="text/javascript">
dojo.addOnLoad(function(){
dojo.connect(dojo.body(), “onclick”, function(evt) {
if(evt.target.tagName != “A”) {return true;}
dojo.stopEvent(evt);
var form = document.createElement(”form”);
form.setAttribute(”target”, window.name ? window.name : “SrPopUp”);
form.setAttribute(”action”, url);
form.setAttribute(”method”,”POST”);
document.appendChild(form);
form.submit();
return false;
});
});
</script>

This method assumes that you have control over the content of the page being shown in the modal dialog. It would also make sense to add a similar listener to the body tag for key events, as a user can trigger an anchor tag by tabbing to it and hitting enter.

Thanks to Danny Goodman and Steiner Overbeck Cook for coming up with this solution.
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