Calling a page via a link with a target attribute

andyMatthews.net

Calling a page via a link with a target attribute

Today over at House of Fusion Claude Schneegans asked:

Suppose I have a page like myPage.cfm. Is it possible in this page to detect if it was called from a link having a TARGET="..." attribute?

I decided to throw something together to determine if this was indeed possible. Turns out it is, and here's how I accomplished it. I first whipped up a plain HTML page with two links on it, like so:


&lt;a href="child.html" target="_blank"&gt;Open child.html with target="_blank"&lt;/a&gt;

&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;

&lt;a href="child.html"&gt;Open child.html as normal window&lt;/a&gt;

I then wrote a companion page which used JavaScript to try and determine the "parent"


var opener = (parent.opener) ? parent.opener.location.href : 'an unknown window';

$('span').html(myParent);

Finally, I used jQuery to write the result of the test to a span tag on the child page. Admittedly this has limited use, but it's a nice means of determining if a target attribute was used to open the window, which essentially gives you access to the parent page with JavaScript if that page is still open.

View the demo.