Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference

Name

showModalDialog( ) — NN n/a IE 4 DOM n/a

Synopsis

showModalDialog(URL[, arguments[, features]])

Displays a special window that remains atop all browser windows until the user explicitly closes the dialog window. This kind of window is different from the browser windows generated with the window.open( ) method. A modal dialog has no scriptable relationship with its opening window once the dialog window is opened. All values necessary for displaying content must be in the HTML document that loads into the window or be passed as parameters. The modal dialog may then have a script set its returnValue property, which becomes the value returned to the original script statement that opened the modal dialog box as the returned value of the showModalDialog( ) method.

You can pass arguments to the modal dialog by creating a data structure that best suits the data. For a single value, a string will do. For multiple values, you can create a string with a unique delimiter between values, or create an array and specify the array as the second parameter for the showModalDialog( ) method. A script in the document loaded into the modal dialog can then examine the window.dialogArguments property and parse the arguments as needed for its scripting purposes. See the dialogArguments property for an example.

The third optional parameter lets you set physical characteristics of the dialog window. These characteristics are specified in a CSS-style syntax. Dimensions for dialogWidth, dialogHeight, dialogLeft ...