Tim Mackey's Weblog

if you're like me and use the onbeforeunload event in a web page to display a reminder to a user who might unintentially lose work by browsing away from the page, then you might be trying to find a way to cancel the event in the case where the user clicks the save button (they obviously don't need reminding now that they have clicked the button...)

on the internet you will find many people suggesting you use something like

window.onbeforeunload = null

but this does not work for me in IE6.  reading up in the MSDN docs for the event object i found a reference to the event.cancelBubble property, which i thought was the solution. but thanks to Orso who pointed out that setting "event.cancelBubble=true" is useless, the way to get rid of the confirm prompt is to exclude the return statement altogether, i chose to use a boolean variable as a flag to decide whether to return something or not. in the example below i add the javascript code programattically in the code behind:

	Page.ClientScript.RegisterStartupScript(typeof(String), "ConfirmClose", @"
	<script>
		window.onbeforeunload = confirmExit;
		function confirmExit()
		{
			if(postback == false)
				return ""Please don't leave this page without clicking the 'Save Changes' or 'Discard Changes' buttons."";												
		}     
	</script>");

then my save button contains the following aspx markup:

    OnClientClick="postback=true;return true;"

this sets the 'postback' variable to true, which gets picked up in the confirmExit() function, having the effect of cancelling the event. 

hope you find this useful.  it is tested and works in IE6 and FF 1.5.0.2.

my aspx page uses a master page, so all the content is inside a ContentPlaceHolder. 
aparently Page.FindControl() only works within a single container, which is really poor functionality if you ask me. 
to complicate the situation further, my aspx page has dynamic controls inside a Panel. 
in order to access the controls of my user control, from the code-behind of the page, i first had to find the panel and then the user control, and then i could finally use that to find the controls i wanted. 
note: you don't have to use the client ID of the control ...ctrl00_blah_blah_blah_YourControlName... when you use the above method, you just use the name of the control, e.g. txtFirstName.