How to prevent new window/tab opening after form post

Question

I have a form submission like:

<form target="_blank" id="discussionForm" method="POST" enctype="multipart/form-data" action="<%=discussionURL%>">

Then I have a Submit button at the end. This works, and it posts to my db, but it opens a new tab with the url of the service that I'm using to post to the db. I don't want that new tab to open. I tried playing around with different targets, but I thought _blank would work. Any suggestions?

Solution 1

Remove target attribute and it should be fine.

target="_blank" actually means it should open in a new tab/window.

Documentation (please always read the docs first)

Solution 2

In the case that someone does not have a target attribute, they may add the onclick and the onkeypress attributes with the following JS as shown below:

<form action="/Account/Login" class="form" method="post" onclick="return event.shiftKey !== true;" onkeypress="return !(event.keyCode === 13 && event.shiftKey);"> </form>

The onclick filters out any 'shift + click'. The onkeypress prevents 'shift + enter'.

Solution 3

You want to use this attribute when you want to display that what the submission of this form returned but on an other page/container _blank|_self|_parent|_top|framename, I suppose it was build back then when people were writing markup with the frames to give it a kind of html support, nowadays it's very bizare to use/need it.

"The target attribute specifies a name or a keyword that indicates where to display the response that is received after submitting the form." - W3Schools

Comments

[Zach Lucas]

if I don't use target="_blank", it replaces the current tab with a blank screen (my ReST service's response). I don't want it opening anything. thoughts?

[kapa]

@ZachLucas You haven't said what was the intended behaviour. In this case, you could catch the submit event for the form, prevent submitting, and post the data using AJAX in the background. Or redirect the form to a hidden iframe - this can be done with the target attribute, check the docs I linked :). forms work like this by default, they open the page in the action, so you have to either prevent it (JS) or find a way around (iframe).