Comments on: Preventing Users from Accidently Navigating Away From Your Flex App

By: Sean

Sean — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 21:47:09 +0000

Hi Bonnie,

It’s been awhile so I’ll do my best to make sure I get all of this straight. You must manually manually make your ExternalInterface call. There are two calls you can make:

1) To set the prompt text (the message the user sees).
2) To toggle the prompt value (whether or not the user should be prompted).

Anytime you want to change one of these values you need to make the ExternalInterface call. For example, if you want to prompt a user if he navigates away from the app with some unsaved document you would make a call to set prompt to true when the document was unsaved and make another call to set prompt to false when the was saved.

By: Bonnie

Bonnie — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 16:31:29 +0000

Hi Sean,

I’m confused as to where/when in my ActionScript code I should be making the ExternalInterface call. Meaning under what conditions?

Or are you saying that it doesn’t matter where I place this call, it’s going to get called automatically when the browser dispatches the onbeforeunload event?

Thanks,
Bonnie

By: Sean

Sean — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 23:01:07 +0000

@Vaibhav: I don’t think there is a way to detect whether OK or Cancel was clicked save that a user who clicks cancel will still be on the page. And that doesn’t really help your situation. Have you tried listening for the onunload event? I believe this is fired after onbeforeunload.

By: Vaibhav

Vaibhav — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 19:21:08 +0000

Hi.. very good post. I have also implemented the same way in my application. But problem is, I want to logout the current user if the user selects OK in the dialogue.
Can we trap the OK and do some required functionality in application and then return back the control to JS for reloading the page. ?

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 29 May 2009 02:50:14 +0000

What did you do Vanessa? Please tell us, this popup window is driving me crazy!!!

By: Vanessa

Vanessa — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 15:54:42 +0000

well i dont knw how but it went away! i made some changes on my laptop and then restarted it. it worked! the message is now gone.

anyway, thanks for the reply. i really appreciate it.

By: Sean

Sean — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 22:11:21 +0000

Vanessa,

Sadly there is nothing you can do abou the “Are you sure you want to navigate away from this page?” and “Press OK to continue, or cancel to stay on the current page.” lines. All you can do is stuff your own message in between the two lines.

In all my Googling I couldn’t find an explanation as to why onbeforeunload works this way, only that is does and there is no getting around it.

By: vanessa

vanessa — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 22:05:10 +0000

i keep getting this error that says:

Are you sure you want to navigate away from this page?

Wait! Here’s where I write my message.

Press OK to continue, or cancel to stay on the current page.

what should i do to avoid it?