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 Sunday, July 15, 2007
How to make F1 bring up a help window in IE without showing the IE Help

A while back I was trying to figure out how to make F1 bring up a custom help window in our web application ActiveFocus. It is easy enough to trap a keypress and open a window showing the help, but to my frustration, after popping up the new window, the built in Internet Explorer help window popped up too!

I tried various variations of cancelling the kepress event, but nothing seems to work. This is for instance how I cancel Ctrl+F (which normally pops up IEs built in Find dialog, but I wanted it to show a custom search dialog instead) :

<script type="text/javascript">

function onKeyDownH(e)
{
  e = window.event;

  var ctrl = (e.ctrlKey) ? true : false;
  if (ctrl == true )
  {
    if ( e.keyCode == 70)
    {
      e.returnValue = false;
      e.keyCode = 0;
      ShowSearchPage();
    }
  }
}

function onloadH(e)
{
  document.onkeydown = onKeyDownH;
  return true;
}

window.onload = onloadH;

</script>

This cancelling approach by the way does work for other keypresses, just not F1, which has some kind of special internal handing. After much head scratching I finally stumbled across this simple solution:

<body onhelp="ShowHelp(); return false;">

Here, ShowHelp does the actual showing of the help window.

Simple, huh? If anyone knows how to make this cross browser compatible I am all ears!

 | 
posted on July 15, 2007  #    by John Waters  Comments [0]
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