Modal Window Posting Back to Itself

I've seen many posts discussing the options we have when using modal windows within a web based application. Often times it seems the greatest hurdle is simply getting the modal window to post back to itself. It appears that most of these threads where this was discussed have been archived, so I'm bringing this topic up again to offer a couple suggestions on this topic.

I noticed that most people use the concept of posting to an iFrame. I used to do this with some degree of success, but you wind up with a bunch of extra pages in your app - 1 to be the modal window with just an iFrame on it and the other page to be the form post target which handles data changes, etc.

My suggestion would be to create a script that runs each time the page is opened as a modal window which would assign a name to itself (the current window).

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...

</head>

<body>
 
<script language=javascript type="text/javascript">

    window.name = "MyModalPopup";

</script>

    <form ...

Then within the form declaration, you can specify the named window to submit to:

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...

<form id="form1" runat="server"  target="MyModalPopup">

...

It is the most elegant solution I have found so far. Also, most modal popups have some sort of Save/Cancel buttons on them. I have had great success by using the following code to get these to work. My example shows it in the ASP.NET context, but it can easily adapt to classic asp without the server roundtrip.

Handle the Cancel routine:

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Protected Sub btnCancel_Click(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles btnCancel.Click

        Response.Write("<SCRIPT language=javascript>window.close();</SCRIPT>")

    End Sub

Handle the Save routine:

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Protected Sub btnSave_Click(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles btnSave.Click

        'example call to a function returning boolean value

        If UpdateDB() Then

            'this is line below is optional depending on if you want to close

            'the window automatically or not.

            Response.Write("<SCRIPT language=javascript>window.close();</SCRIPT>")

        Else

            'write some sort of error message or js alert to the page notifying 

            'the user of the updatedb error

        End If
 
    End Sub

I've always gotten great ideas from anonymously browsing this forum...I hope this contribution can help someone out there!