Question

This may be a retarded question, but is there an elegant way to mimic the behavior of an anchor tag when submitting a form? I’d like my users to be able to hold down the control key while submitting a form and have the result open in a new window. Right now I’m using a funky, unreliable javascript workaround that I’m embarrassed to post here. Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

If you use jQuery, then you can do it like this. Let’s say that you have form

<form id="test">
    (...)
    <input type="submit" id="test_submit" />
</form>

Bind a keydown and keyup events to it like this

$('#test').keydown(function(e) {
   if (e.keyCode == /* here put the key code of CTRL which I don't remember */ )
       $(this).data('ctrl', true);
});
$('#test').keyup(function(e) {
    $(this).data('ctrl', false);
});

and then handle the click event on submit button

$('#test_submit').click(function(e) {
    e.preventDefault();
    // do the serialization and post via AJAX
    if ($('#test').data('ctrl'))
    {
        // do the new window creation
    }
    else
    {
        // update this window url
    }
});

I hope that this works, cause I didn’t test it. 🙂