How to check if a named window is open?

[gizmonic]

Hi,

What I need to know is how I can check to see if a particular named window is open or not. (I want to have a detachable menu, so if they open the menu in a floating window, the page will not put the menu on the side, but if the floating menu is not open, it will print the menu....) TIA!

-Justin

[Anon]

Justin,

You probably need to turn to JavaScript to do this. I haven't seen any window handling routines in PHP.

I would guess that an if(window_name) would do it, but the Window object might have a method to declare its precense. You need to check some JS docs to find this out.

Integrating JS and PHP is then the next course on the menu. As PHP is serverside and JS is clientside, you need to pass the info from the JS script to a PHP script through a page load. Using document.reload can do this elegantly.

Something like this pseudo code

JavaScript function:
function check_window()
{
if (!menu_window)
document.reload('my_page.php?no_menu=1');
}

BODY tag:
<... onload="check_windwow()">

PHP:
if ($no_menu)
open_menu();
...

document.reload is a great function BTW. It relaods immediately and leaves no traces in the browser history - contrary to the refresh meta tag.

Hope this helps

Martin