Greetings!
If a user presses the ENTER key while in a form, the form’s submitted.
Is there a standard approach / way to trap that so that, for example,
the form would only be submitted by a mouse click on the submit button?
TIA,
Bill
I should have said “a standard Rails approach”.
----- Original Message -----
From: Bill W.
To: [email protected]
Sent: Tuesday, September 02, 2008 2:01 PM
Subject: [Rails] How can I prevent ENTER from submitting form?
Greetings!
If a user presses the ENTER key while in a form, the form’s submitted.
Is
there a standard approach / way to trap that so that, for example, the
form
would only be submitted by a mouse click on the submit button?
TIA,
Bill
On Tue, Sep 2, 2008 at 3:06 PM, Bill W. [email protected]
wrote:
Greetings!
If a user presses the ENTER key while in a form, the form’s submitted. Is
there a standard approach / way to trap that so that, for example, the form
would only be submitted by a mouse click on the submit button?TIA,
Bill
Must say this is an odd request. It drives me absolutely nuts when
enter does NOT submit the form and I’m forced to reach for my mouse.
That said, it’s simple: don’t add a submit button (input
type=“submit”). Use a link that uses javascript to submit the form.
Jason
For the button, do not use type=“submit” attribute, instead use
type=“button”, and a on click handler. So, your button markup will
look something like below
for the record… the type of submit button isn’t going to change this
behavior. the presence of a submit button doesn’t even change it.
outside of using js (to either trap keys or return false or whatever
approach you’d use), i don’t think you can do it. but you’d have to be
catching the return and perhaps comparing “this” to verify which
element is sending the “click”. not sure how much you wanted a
purely-js solution so i’m not spending lots of cycles processing it.
but it definitely could be done with js. hth
RSL
attaching a little html for anyone who wants to verify my claim that a
button-less form can still submit from hitting enter inside a form
input [text].
RSL
I’m just thinking that a single line form will submit on the Enter
button, even if there is no submit button, if this is the case and you
don’t want to submit the form at all you could add some javascript
like this (assuming you are including prototype) :
$(‘id-of-form’).observe(‘submit’, function(e) {
e.stop();
}.bindAsEventListener(this)); // Untested
alternatively, if you still want the form to be submitted if/when a
submit button is pressed maybe something like:
$(‘id-of-form’).observe(‘submit’, function(e) {
e.keyCode == Event.KEY_ENTER ? e.stop() : null;
}.bindAsEventListener(this)); // Untested
Simon
Bah, I did accidentally name both elements the same thing, however,
having them named right (name=“password”) doesn’t change anything, the
form still doesn’t submit on enter.
Jason
what the heck. that is weird. is it perhaps the method=“post”? what’s
going on here where you and i can make really similar HTML that reacts
completely differently? curiouser and curiouser.
RSL
Set up an onsubmit handler for the form that returns false unless some
value is true.
Configure the submit button to set that value to true and then submit
the form.
-philip
And as a counter point, I present this form, which does not submit on
enter
<div>
<input type="password" name="password" name="login"/>
</div>
And this one, that does
Submittable Buttonless Form <div>
<input type="password" name="password" name="login"/>
</div>
<div>
<input type="submit"/>
</div>
So yeah, there’s a combination of form fields that will not submit on
Enter. Sometimes it will work, sometimes it won’t. If you want it to
work all the time, put in a submit tag. If you don’t want it to happen
ever, you probably need extra javascript just to be safe.
Jason
Ok ok, stop… just stop… you’re all making it too complicated.
[shakes head]
Let’s go over things…
You want a button that submits normally but want to try and stop the
enter key submitting it. To do this, you’re going to need to understand
the relationship between the ENTER key, the Mousebutton and Javascript.
When you press ENTER in a form, the form automatically goes to the first
Submit button it can find (or usually the closest in accordance to
tabindexing) and then submits the form. It treats the ENTER key like it
was the left mouse button because it has to assume that some people
don’t have a mouse (partially sighted, screen readers etc).
In Javascript, when you press ENTER in a form, it also relates this to
the left mouse button being clicked, which therefor activates the
“onclick” event. It also sets a keycode (13) so it knows what key on the
keyboard was pressed.
However, Javascript has another event called “onmousedown” which only
works if the mouse button is pressed down. It doesn’t get related to the
keyboard or the ENTER key. I believe onkeydown is for that.
Now!, the onmousedown event is activated before the onclick method which
means we have a way of setting a rule before doing anything with
onclick. (Onclick doesn’t activate until you let go of the clicked
button).
So, the easiest solution (if we don’t do anything fancy with functions)
is to apply two javascript events to your submit button.
Example
How it works?
What happens is… if you click the button, the onmousedown event runs
first which renames/sets the title of the button. When you let go of the
mousebutton, the onclick takes effect and checks the title to see if its
set to 1. If it is, then it submits, otherwise it returns false.
This means that, if you pressed ENTER, onmousedown wouldn’t have renamed
the title which means the onclick will return false and not submit the
form.
Obviously, as I know the Mootools library I’ve made a transparent method
which just adds the two events to all input=submit buttons on the page.
The inline example here is just to show you the method for copying and
pasting quickly 
Hope that helps someone!
Adam
www.greatbigmassive.net
The simplest way is pass this code to your form 
Easy and clean, thanks you
On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 10:23 AM, Albert C. [email protected]
wrote:
Easy and clean, thanks you
If you want/need to prevent “enter” from submitting a form, you are
doing it wrong and you could be be alienating some disabled people who
do not use a mouse and rely on their keyboard. I know even if that’s
not the case, if I ran into a site that prevented me from pressing
enter to submit a form (because I am still a tab, tab, enter person) I
would walk away from that site and probably blacklist it in my
personal DNS.
Jordon B. wrote in post #1084597:
On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 10:23 AM, Albert C. [email protected]
wrote:Easy and clean, thanks you
If you want/need to prevent “enter” from submitting a form, you are
doing it wrong and you could be be alienating some disabled people who
do not use a mouse and rely on their keyboard. I know even if that’s
not the case, if I ran into a site that prevented me from pressing
enter to submit a form (because I am still a tab, tab, enter person) I
would walk away from that site and probably blacklist it in my
personal DNS.
Hello, My problem is than I’m doing a excel style form, and some fields
have remote calls (onchange) to calculate another fields. And the form
has a submit button, so if user press enter the remote call (ajax call)
is not finished (some times not initiated) when the form is submited and
saved with bad calculated values.
To solve it, I have to do two things:
1 - Prevent enter key (this forum issue)
2 - And,despite this, user can click on submit button faster than field
onchange function is finished. This second issue i still don’t know how
to solve it
What do you think?
Do you have the second point answer?
thanks a lot and sorry for my bad english
Albert
I don’t know my english but my javascript is very newbie, too much
newbie
¿ Is not this, the same or similar, that disable the sumbmit button at
the begining of onchange event and activate it at the end?..something
like:
<%= f.text_field :amount, onchange=>“disable_submit();” +
remote_function(…my caculations) +“enable_submit();” ) %>
where enable_submit() and disbale_submit() just does what says, activate
and deactivate the submit button
isn’t it?
Thanks,
Albert
On Nov 15, 2012, at 12:26 PM, Albert C. wrote:
would walk away from that site and probably blacklist it in my
onchange function is finished. This second issue i still don’t know how
to solve itWhat do you tink?
Do you hace the pont 2 answer?thanks a lot and sorry for my bad english
Your English is guaranteed 100% better than my attempt at your native
language, unless that’s Latin (didn’t think it was).
What you need to do is use callback functions in your processing
JavaScript to disable the submit button while they’re running, and
enable them when they’re done. That way if you have blocked the enter
key, the only way the form will be submitted is with a click on an
enabled form button. Here’s a quick mockup (I don’t know what your
existing cell calculation code looks like).
//stop all submits from the form
$$(‘form’).invoke(‘observe’, ‘submit’, function(evt){
evt.stop();
});
//let a click on send the form
$(‘real_submit’).observe(‘click’, function(evt){
this.form.submit();
});
//fake spreadsheet code for demo purposes
$$(‘input[type=“text”]’).invoke(‘observe’, ‘blur’, function(evt){
var elm = evt.element();
var submits = elm.select(‘input[type=“submit”]’);
new Ajax.Request(’/some/endpoint’, {
parameters: {id: elm.id, value: $F(elm)},
onCreate: function(){ submits.invoke(‘disable’); }, //can’t be
clicked
onSuccess: function(transport){
submits.invoke(‘enable’); //can be clicked
$(‘total’).update(transport.responseText);
}
});
});
That’s all written with Prototype.js methods, but you could do similar
in any JavaScript you like.
Walter
Thanks for that Adam, helped me a lot.