My Onshape - Open In New Browser Tab - DON'T Navigate to New Tab.

owen_sparks

Hi folks.

Often I'll start my day by going to "My Onshape" and opening the documents I wish to use be selecting "Open in New Browser Tab".  I'll want to open a bunch of them...

I find it annoying that as soon as I open the new tab OnS navigates away from My Onshape and to the new tab so there's load of switching forwards and backwards. 

I'd like the option to open the new tabs, but not navigate to them please.

Cheers,

Owen S.

MBartlett21

@owen_sparks
It seems that if you ctrl+click the link, it opens in a new tab and does not switch to it.

owen_sparks

Thanks @MBartlett21 that's good to know

Owen S,

3dcad

I feel this is more like browser specific extension feature.

With chrome:
- Click to open into current window
- Shift click to open and move focus into new window
- Ctrl click to open into new tab but keep focus on current

Add these to extra mouse buttons 👌

lougallo

These are browser behaviors usiing CTRL/CMD click

Jake_Rosenfeld

Not sure if this is Mac behavior or Chrome, but I can get this behavior with a middle mouse button click.  Possibly useful for your workflow

owen_sparks

Thanks gents

Owen S.

MBartlett21

@Jake_Rosenfeld
Middle click does not work for opening document tabs in new tabs, but ctrl+click does.
Why is that?

john_mcclary

There are some areas where this does not work with middle click,

For example switching to a part from an assembly:

Jake_Rosenfeld

Middle click is not Onshape behavior, it's just browser behavior so YMMV.  I use it all the time in my browser to open links in a new tab so I figured I'd share, but I'm not sure where it will work in Onshape and where it won't.

john_mcclary

Yea, that's what I was pointing out, some context menu's will, others won't

What is special about the links in the context menu above vrs this one for example

Jake_Rosenfeld

@john_mcclary

Without actually looking into the code I suspect that the ones it works on are html <a> tags (in other words, hyperlinks disguised with some nice styling), and the ones that it doesn't work on are just buttons with a click handler that invoke some piece of javascript that eventually switches tabs or opens a new browser tab.  So basically the difference is whether we've implemented some custom behavior for what is being clicked, or whether we're just providing a clickable link and the browser is handling the behavior.

john_mcclary

I was guessing the same thing, my question now is:
Why are some menus html tags, and others buttons? 

Not saying you are doing things wrong, (how would I know) Now it's just to satisfy my curiosity

Jake_Rosenfeld

So, something that says "switch to" has the intention of switching you from one document tab to another (Or possibly to another document).  This would be implemented as a button so that we do not do a page reload when you click on it (instead we just hook up the button to some piece of code that changes the existing page in exactly the way that we want).  You would not expect us to load an entirely new page when clicking on that, rather you would expect to stay inside of the Onshape application, and we just load up the new experience within the framework that already exists (the navigation bar, the tabs across the bottom, etc.).  In other words, clicking on "switch to" doesn't just tell the browser "redirect to this new URL", it actually just does all the switching manually, and then also manually changes the URL at the top of the page to reflect the new context.  You can prove this to yourself by going to one of those assemblies and clicking on the switch to; notice that the Onshape bar at the top does not go away.  This means we did the switch ourselves, within the Onshape application.  If we weren't handling it ourselves you would see a blank screen for a moment and whatever graphics the browser displays when you click on a hyperlink (some kind of loading spinner probably).

Something that says "open in new browser tab" has to open a new tab anyway, so we cannot get around having to do a full load.  The easiest way to handle this is to just let the browser do it.

Hopefully this is useful?  Always happy to help sate some curiosity!

3dcad

Sometimes it is very difficult to believe that Onshape UI is 'just a webpage'. 🧐 It just feels so 👌