Silverlight, popup windows, and browser/out of browser differences

Opening popup windows in Silverlight is a pain in the rear. However, a way has been found to work around this. Subclass the HyperlinkButton and expose a new method that calls the protected Click() method.


internal class OOBPopup : HyperlinkButton
{
public void Navigate(Uri url)
{
this.NavigateUri = url;
this.TargetName = "_blank";
base.OnClick();
}
}


To use:

new OOBPopup().Navigate(url);


Let’s compare this with the two other options, HtmlPage.Navigate() and HtmlPage.PopupWindow(). Everything below is on Windows 7 64-bit. (IB = in browser, OOB = out of browser)

IB IE 9: All three methods work.
IB Safari 5.1.1: Only the OOB popup works.
IB Firefox 7: Only the OOB popup works.
IB Chrome: Only the OOB popup works.
OOB: Only the OOB popup works.

Where a method does not work, either you will get a message saying that the HTML/DOM scripting bridge is disabled, or the browser (especially Safari) will just eat the popup and act like nothing happened.

With the OOBPopup class setting enableHtmlPopups in the OBJECT tag hosting the silverlight app is not required, so it’s a great way to get popup windows to work. The app I am working on makes heavy use of SSRS so popup windows are necessary.

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