window.location.href doesn't redirect

Question

I know this is a question much discussed but I can't figure out why it does not work for me.

This is my function:

function ShowComments(){

 alert("fired");
 var movieShareId = document.getElementById('movieId');
 //alert("found div" + movieShareId.textContent || movieShareId.innerText);
 //alert("redirect location: /comments.aspx?id=" + movieShareId.textContent || movieShareId.innerText + "/");
 window.location.href = "/comments.aspx?id=" + movieShareId.textContent || movieShareId.innerText + "/";
 var newLocation = window.location;
 //alert("full location: " + window.location);

}

If I have the alerts uncommented or if I have Mozilla's bugzilla open it works fine, otherwise it does not redirect to the other page.

Any ideas why?

Answer 1

If you are calling this function through a submit button. This may be the reason why the browser does not redirect. It will run the code in the function and then submit the page instead of redirect. In this case change the type tag of your button.

Answer 2

From this answer,

window.location.href not working

you just need to add

return false;

at the bottom of your function

Answer 3

Though it is very old question, i would like to answer as i faced same issue recently and got solution from here -

http://www.codeproject.com/Questions/727493/JavaScript-document-location-href-not-working Solution:

document.location.href = 'Your url',true;

This worked for me.

Answer 4

Some parenthesis are missing.

Change

 window.location.href = "/comments.aspx?id=" + movieShareId.textContent || movieShareId.innerText + "/";

to

 window.location = "/comments.aspx?id=" + (movieShareId.textContent || movieShareId.innerText) + "/";

No priority is given to the || compared to the +.

Remove also everything after the window.location assignation : this code isn't supposed to be executed as the page changes.

Note: you don't need to set location.href. It's enough to just set location.

Answer 5

window.location.replace is the best way to emulate a redirect:

function ShowComments(){
    var movieShareId = document.getElementById('movieId');
    window.location.replace("/comments.aspx?id=" + (movieShareId.textContent || movieShareId.innerText) + "/");
}

More information about why window.location.replace is the best javascript redirect can be found right here.

Answer 6

Make sure you're not sending a '#' at the end of your URL. In my case, that was preventing window.location.href from working.

Answer 7

I'll give you one nice function for this problem:

function url_redirect(url){
    var X = setTimeout(function(){
        window.location.replace(url);
        return true;
    },300);

    if( window.location = url ){
        clearTimeout(X);
        return true;
    } else {
        if( window.location.href = url ){
            clearTimeout(X);
            return true;
        }else{
            clearTimeout(X);
            window.location.replace(url);
            return true;
        }
    }
    return false;
};

This is universal working solution for the window.location problem. Some browsers go into problem with window.location.href and also sometimes can happen that window.location fail. That's why we also use window.location.replace() for any case and timeout for the "last try".

Answer 8

In case anyone was a tired and silly as I was the other night whereupon I came across many threads espousing the different methods to get a javascript redirect, all of which were failing...

You can't use window.location.replace or document.location.href or any of your favourite vanilla javascript methods to redirect a page to itself.

So if you're dynamically adding in the redirect path from the back end, or pulling it from a data tag, make sure you do check at some stage for redirects to the current page. It could be as simple as:

if(window.location.href == linkout)
{
    location.reload();
}
else
{
    window.location.href = linkout;
}