title: Javascript - form select element open url in new window and submit form
body: <p><strong>UPDATED</strong> - please read further details below original question</p>
  
  <p>I have a select form element with various urls, that I want to open in a new window when selected - to do this I have the following code in the element's onchange event:</p>
  
  <pre><code>window.open(this.options[this.selectedIndex].value,'_blank');
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This works fine. But I also want to submit the form when changing this select element value - I've tried various things, but I can't seem to get it to work.</p>
  
  <p>I have jquery, so if it's easier to achieve via that then that's fine.</p>
  
  <p><em>Update - I've just realised there is another issue with the above, because some of the urls are actually used to generate and output pdfs, and these do not work - they open and then immediately close (at least in IE7).</em></p>
  
  <p><strong>UPDATE 07/05/09</strong> - I've now opened a bounty for this question as I really need to come up with a working solution. I did originally get around the issue by displaying links instead of a form select element, but this is no longer feasible.</p>
  
  <p>The reason I need the above is that I have a large number of files that might need to be viewed / printed, too many to reasonably display as a list of links. I need to submit the form to record the fact a particular file has been viewed / printed, then display a log of the file history on the form - I'm comfortable with achieving this side of things, so don't require assistance there, but I thought it would help to place the context. </p>
  
  <p>So, to clarify my requirements - I need a form select element and 'View' button that when clicked will not only launch a file download in a new window (note the above issue I faced when these files were PDFs), but also submit the form that contains the select element.</p>