Question

I am on a work intranet only having to support IE8. I am creating a page called "watch video" which (as the name suggests) serves a video to the client. A page linking to a video will open this page in a popup with the link in the url. The person accessing the video (and a datetime stamp) is then logged into the database.

The page is just a simple "Your video will start momentarily, otherwise click here" with the click here having a href of FILE:\\sharedDrive:\somePath\someVideo.wmv. I then automatically open the video by running document.getElementById('anchor').click() to click the anchor. The video then opens in Windows Media Player and i then want to do window.close().

But the page has changed to a blank page because I have clicked the anchor. Do you know how I could close the page after it has redirected? I am trying this:

<script type="text/javascript">
    document.getElementById('watchVideo').click();
    self.close();
</script>

Answer 1

The best solution that i found (inspired by PualPRO’s answer) was this

<a id="myAnchor" href="FILE:\\sharedDrive:\somePath\someVideo.wmv" target="myIframe" onclick="setTimeout(function(){window.close()}, 5000)">Watch Video</a>

<iframe name="myIframe" style="display:none;"></iframe>

<script>
    document.getElementById('myAnchor').click();
</script>

So then on load it automatically clicks the anchor to trigger then events. I put the window.close() inside a setTimeout so that the page had time to load the href before closing itself. Otherwise it would close before opening the file.