How to get the selector for window.location.href using jQuery 1.4.4

Question

We have a js function that redirects the user to a new page from a dropdown using Struts2. Here is the code.

The Struts2 dropdown that starts everything:

<s:select name="selectName" list="List" listKey="nameCode" headerKey='-1'
listValue="description" headerValue="Please select..."  value="namedValue" onchange="redirectNextPage(this.value)" />

Here is the redirect function that fires next:

function redirectNextPage(id){
   var page = "<s:url action='<path>.action'/>?<param>="; 
   window.location.href=(page + id); 

 }

I need to use a selector to capture window.location.href and bind it to my UnBindWindow function.

//Bind Links we dont want to affect
$('a[href^="http://"]').bind('focus', UnBindWindow); //Code not working?

//UnBind Function
    function UnBindWindow(){
        $(window).unbind('beforeunload', ReturnMessage);
    }
...

I incorrectly assumed that focus would be the proper DOM event type I needed. What happens is the select goes to the javascript function and then the onbeforeunload event fires without my jQuery code getting called.

How do I properly bind an event to the window.location.href so I can prevent a beforeunload dialog from firing off the select dropdown, but still work for other elements on the jsp page?

Answer 1

After debugging I realized that the Struts2 tag was capturing the event and it wasn't bubbling for jQuery to intercept.

I never could hit this code:

$('select').change(function() {
          alert('This worked!');
    });

However, knowing the problem now, I put the unbind directly into the redirectNextPage function and it worked as expected.

    $(window).unbind('beforeunload', ReturnMessage);
    window.location.href=(page + id);

I hope this helps someone else.