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Submitting forms

return;

}

};

This method can then be called in the

onload

event handler:

Submitting forms

In regular HTML, you submit the form by using a Submit button or an image that acts like a Submit

button:

When the user clicks either one of these buttons, the form is submitted without requiring any additional

coding. If you press Enter on the keyboard when one of these types of buttons is present, the browser

submits the form as if the button were clicked.

You can test to see if a form is submitting by providing an alert for the

action

attribute:

This submits the form to the JavaScript function, which just pops up an alert with the word

“Submitted”

in it. This is helpful to test form submission because it doesn’t actually involve going back to the server.

If you want to submit the form without using one of the previously mentioned buttons, you can use the

submit()

method. The

submit()

method is part of the DOM definition of a

<form/>

element and can

be used anywhere on a page. To use this method, you must first get a reference to the

<form/>

element

either by using

getElementById()

or by using the

document.forms

collection. Each of the following

three lines is an acceptable way to reference a form:

oForm = document.getElementById(“form1”);

oForm = document.forms[“form1”];

oForm = document.forms[0];

After getting the form reference, you can just call the

submit()

method directly:

oForm.submit();

Be careful when using this method. In slow-loading pages, it is possible that the

user may start typing into a field before the page has been fully loaded. When the

focus is then set to the first field, it disrupts the user ’s input. To prepare for this

issue, first check for a value in the first field; if one is there, don’t set the focus to it.

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