Loss of session in nonmodal popped up from Modal

I have a problem where if I popup a non-modal window via window.open(); from a MODAL dialog that in turn was opened from the main browser page, the top level non-modal starts a new session.

Here is the scenario:

User is on a page of our application, in his/her main browser window, and decides to edit his/her preferences.

Preferences edit occurs in a modal popup, so the main page executes window.showModalDialog() to open the preferences popup.

Part of the preferences popup contains several textareas which must be spellchecked. When the user pressed the spellcheck button in the modal popup, our spellcheck software is launched via a window.open().

However, because this latest open causes a new session, instead of going to the spellcheck page, it goes to the login page.

So here are my questions:

1) Why does a non-modal opened from a modal cause a new session to start

2) What can I do to keep the new window in the same session as the modal popup and the base browser

I have had several idea suggested, none of which will work for various reasons of required capability.

The newest window MUST have a reference to it's opener (and the elements in the opener's page).

ANy and all help is appreciated.

Thanks!

Answer this question

Loss of session in nonmodal popped up from Modal

Shadi Mari
I have a different/similar problem.

Looks like a Modal Window prevents the File Save Dialog from appearing.

I have links to a bunch of Excel File Downloads in my Modal, and when I click on any of these links, the Modal becomes blank. Under the normal situation, of course, I would expect to see the File Open/Save dialog.

I tried this same with a .txt file and the content shows up on the browser. This is because MIME setup for Excel is to open in a new window.
NewName
Eric - could you provide some guidance on how to open a page for anonymous access I'm having the same problem, and it seems like yours is the only possible solution around.
Ganesh sethuraman
We are also facing problems because of this bug. I will explain the scenario. We are opening a modal popup window from my web page. If I am working on that page only then no problem session is still alive. But our requirement force us to open one more modal popup from this already opened one. This causes loss of session and we are keeping some inporant data in session which becomes unavailable. Also when we close the popup window and return back to parent page, this page requires authentication and it redirects it to login page again. As a work around we are passing the required data to these modal popups as an aruments to showModalPopup() function. But still session loss is causing the problem when user returns back to parent page. We are using IE 7.0 version. Any help or direction is appriciated.
me&#42;

Sorry it was nto clear from your question that you were in a developer environment.

Let us knwo if you see the issue again.

Thanks
-Dave
John Fly
That post is from 2004, here we are wrapping up 2006 and it's still an issue. Good to see such concern for fixing known issues. I think someone fails to realize that issues need to be fixed, we can't always wait 2-3 years for the next version. (Same mentality applied to the VS team, we're limping along with a ton of vs2005 bugs a year after it was released).

Luckily, I realized (before pulling my hair out) that we could just make the target page open for anonymous access, it's content didn' require authentication. Once we allowed anonymous access, the session change was ignored by our security layer. So we've gotten around this 3 year old known, but ignored, issue. Of course, not everyone (including us, next time) will be able to turn off authentication requirements for their pages.

Good luck to all.
xna3der

Hi,

Because the current window is in a modal state with a modal dialog displayed any window.open command will start a new session since the current window needs to remain in the modal state.

I can only suggest using a modeless dialog instead of a modal one.

Thanks
-Dave
Alexander Schwerdtner
We have had issues with this, too.

It seems it happens only when another IE window was opened before the one containing the showModalDialog call. Here is another person describing it some time ago including a response from Microsoft Online Support:

http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.aspnet/browse_thread/thread/24b40a6331e979e1/76027e614a3af54d lnk=st&q=open+window+from+modal+dialog&rnum=3#76027e614a3af54d

Comments anyone

Thanks,

Sven
medel
I don't think I follow you at all, that makes no sense to me.

Aside from that. I can now open the non-modal from the modal, and it works. Tho I can't for the life of me put a finger on what I did.

It SEEMED to start working right after I set a DEBUGGER breakpoint in my javascript and examined some vars. Didn't actually change anything, just LOOKED.

I had also set html pages to be handled thru the .net 2.0 runtime, but removed that.

It's been working ever since. And it now also works on our staging server, which didn't work this morning, and works now and HAS NOT been modified in between. That leads me to believe it's something with the client only, tho I have no idea WHAT.

I'm having another developer build the same code and try it out, see what he gets.

Magical fixes make me VERY nervous. I prefer unfixables.
Loss of session in nonmodal popped up from Modal

Answer this question