Can I override onbeforeunload for a particular element?

Question

I have a page which does quite a bit of work and I don't want the user to be able to navigate away from that page (close browser, hit back button, etc.) without getting a warning. I found that the onbeforeunload event (which I think is IE-specific, which works fine for me as the project uses lots of ActiveX) works great.

Problem is, I want the user to be able to click on a little "help" icon in the upper-right corner and pop up a help window at any time. This causes onbeforeunload to fire, even though the main window never goes anywhere and the page never unloads.

The JavaScript function that runs when the onbeforeunload event runs just puts text into event.returnValue. If I could ascertain, somehow, that the help icon is the one that was clicked then I could just not put text into event.returnValue in that situation. But how could I have the page figure that out?

Answer 1

Let me guess: the help "icon" is actually a link with a javascript: url? Change it to a real button, a real link, or at least put the functionality in an onclick event handler (that prevents the default behavior). Problem solved.

<!-- clicking this link will do nothing. No onbeforeunload handler triggered. 
Nothing. 
And you could put something in before the return false bit...
...and the onunload handler would still not get called... -->
<a href="http://www.google.com/" onclick="return false;">blah1</a>
<!-- this should also do nothing, but IE will trigger the onbeforeunload 
handler -->
<a href="javascript:void(0)">blah2</a>