custom form submit in a new browser tab

Question

I have a custom form in Drupal 6 and every thing works perfectly except I want the form submit to open in new window.
I tried using the following code as per form api for drupal 6 but it does not work

$form['save_and_print'] = array(
      '#type' => 'submit',
      '#value' => t('Save and Print'),
          '#attributes' => array('target' => '_blank'), // this does not work
);

Was anyone able to achieve this? Please help!

Answer 1

You have to set the target attribute in the form tag itself:

$form['#attributes']['target'] = '_blank';

Put this code somewhere in your form function.

Update:

To get this functionality to a particular button, you have to be tricky.

$form['save_and_print'] = array(
      '#type' => 'submit',
      '#value' => t('Save and Print'),
      '#attributes' => array('onclick' => 'this.form.target="_blank";return true;'),
);

When clicked, this will set the parent form element's target attribute to _blank which opens in a new tab when pressed. If you clicked the button once and when you click some other button in the same form, it will open in a new tab as well because the previous onclick event set the target attribute to _blank.

To workaround, you have to set this onclick event to ALL submits.

To submit the form in same page/tab:

$form['save'] = array(
      '#type' => 'submit',
      '#value' => t('Save'),
      '#attributes' => array('onclick' => 'this.form.target="_self";return true;'),
);

To submit in a new tab:

$form['save_and_print'] = array(
      '#type' => 'submit',
      '#value' => t('Save and Print'),
      '#attributes' => array('onclick' => 'this.form.target="_blank";return true;'),
);

demo