Question

I want to use an external browser window to implement a preview functionality in a silverlight application. There is a list of items and whenever the user clicks one of these items, it’s opened in a separate browser window (the content is a pdf document, which is why it is handled ouside of the SL app).

Now, to achieve this, I simply use

HtmlPage.Window.Navigate(new Uri("http://www.bing.com"), "_blank");

which works fine.

Now my client doesn’t like the fact that every click opens up a new browser window. He would like to see the browser window reused every time an item is clicked. So I went out and tried implementing this:

Option 1 – Use the overload of the Navigate method, like so:

HtmlPage.Window.Navigate(new Uri("http://www.bing.com"), "foo");

I was assuming that the window would be reused when the same target parameter value (foo) would be used in subsequent calls.
This does not work. I get a new window every time.

Option 2 – Use the PopupWindow method on the HtmlPage

HtmlPage.PopupWindow(new Uri("http://www.bing.com"), "blah", new HtmlPopupWindowOptions());

This does not work. I get a new window every time.

Option 3 – Get a handle to the opened window and reuse that in subsequent calls

private HtmlWindow window;
private void navigationButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
    if (window == null)
        window = HtmlPage.Window.Navigate(new Uri("http://www.bing.com"), "blah");
    else
        window.Navigate(new Uri("http://www.bing.com"), "blah");

    if (window == null)
        MessageBox.Show("it's null");
}

This does not work. I tried the same for the PopupWindow() method and the window is null every time, so a new window is opened on every click. I have checked both the EnableHtmlAccess and the IsPopupWindowAllowed properties, and they return true, as they should.

Option 4 – Use Eval method to execute some custom javascript

private const string javascript = @"var popup = window.open('', 'blah') ; 
                                    if(popup.location != 'http://www.bing.com' ){
                                        popup.location = 'http://www.bing.com';
                                    }
                                    popup.focus();";

private void navigationButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
    HtmlPage.Window.Eval(javascript);
}

This does not work. I get a new window every time.

option 5 – Use CreateInstance to run some custom javascript on the page

private void navigationButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
    HtmlPage.Window.CreateInstance("thisIsPlainHell");
}

and in my aspx I have

function thisIsPlainHell() {
    var popup = window.open('http://www.bing.com', 'blah');
}

This doesn’t work. I get a new window every time.

Am I doing something wrong? I’m definitely no javascript expert, so I’m hoping it’s something obvious I’m missing here.

Cheers,
Phil

Answer 1

Apparently the problem is that the window.name property is lost when navigating to bing.com. When I navigate to one of my custom pages it seems to be working fine.