Question

I have an ASP.NET MVC web application. The application can be managed with a “remote control”, which is a jQuery UI dialog and appears only when a user with sufficent permissions logs in and clicks on the “show remote control” button. (Obviously, the HTML code of the dialog is not there otherwise.)

When the user clicks on a link on the site, this dialog closes itself.
I want the dialog to “remember” that it was open and open itself automatically in such cases.

What is the simplest and most cross-browser-compatible way of doing this?
(Let’s assume for now that I don’t want to care about archaic browsers, the people who will use this will use new browsers.)

Here is the code that initializes the dialog.

$(document).ready(function () {
    $("#remote-control").dialog({
        autoOpen: false,
        show: "explode",
        hide: "explode",
        title: "Távirányító",
        minWidth: 220,
        maxWidth: 260,
        width: 190,
        height: 300,
        maxHeight: 500,
        position: [50, 100]
    });

    $("#remote-control-opener").click(function () {
        $("#remote-control").dialog("open");
        return false;
    });
});

Thanks in advance for your answers!

Answer 1

There are two ways you could do this. Use either a cookie or a URL parameter to set a value like isRemoteVisible which you can check on page load. The jquery libraries I would use to achieve this are:

• Cookie approach: https://github.com/carhartl/jquery-cookie
• Url Param approach: http://www.mathias-bank.de/jQuery/jquery.getUrlParam.js

Using a url parameter is more reliable as your user may have cookies disabled. After you’ve detected the value of your cookie/param, you can programmtically trigger the remote control to pop up.

Edit

You can set a cookie using the library mentioned above as follows:

$.cookie('isRemoteVisible', 'true');

You can then get this cookie value as follows:

var showRemote = $.cookie('isRemoteVisible');

Finally, perform a check on this to open the dialog:

if ("true" == showRemote)
     $("#remote-control").dialog("open");