Question

Working in SharePoint 2010, with SharePoint Designer 2010, I have a DispForm to which I’ve added a DVWP that displays a filtered view of another relative list. The DVWP has a ‘New’ link which opens the NewForm for that list in a modal dialog, using OpenPopUpPage (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff410825.aspx).

After 5 – 12 seconds, the blinking cursor disappears from the first control and the focus switches to the ‘Close’ button. If the user was trying to type and happens to hit the Enter key when the focus switches to the ‘Close’ button, the background is no longer darkened and the ‘Cancel’ button no longer works. The form is still displayed on the screen, and the user can ‘Save’ but the modal never goes away until the page is refreshed.

If the user notices that the modal has lost focus and clicked back on the form, everything works as it should and all is well.

Observations:

When the control/modal loses focus, the ‘Close’ button does not trigger a ‘focusin’ event. But, $(document.activeElement).attr(“value”) displayed in the console shows that it’s the active element.

Questions:

1. Why is the modal losing focus?
2. Does anyone have a Javascript/jQuery workaround to capture the event and set the focus back where it was?
3. Alternately, what if I lock the form and wait for this focus-change to complete, then unlock it and set the focus on the first field? Ideas?

Answer 1

I figured out the problem: the DVWP was using Auto-Refresh with the Async Update. This was running every 15 secs, taking the focus away from the modal, then not returning it to the last control.

So, we turned of the auto-refresh and used the callback from the modal close to trigger a click on the manual refresh button instead.