Disable Submit Button Upon Form Submission

By  on  

Multiple clicks on a "Submit" button can cause duplicate processing if your programming is slow or the user's connection is lagging. Duplicate processing can include duplicate database records, multiple emails, or different types of errors. JavaScript provides an easy way to disable the multiple submission of a form once the form has been submitted.

The Code

In the HTML, use the following "onsubmit" information:

It's important to trigger the even on form submission -- not everyone clicks the "submit" button. You will also need to give your submit button the submit_button ID attribute.

Recent Features

  • By
    Regular Expressions for the Rest of Us

    Sooner or later you'll run across a regular expression. With their cryptic syntax, confusing documentation and massive learning curve, most developers settle for copying and pasting them from StackOverflow and hoping they work. But what if you could decode regular expressions and harness their power? In...

  • By
    Create a CSS Flipping Animation

    CSS animations are a lot of fun; the beauty of them is that through many simple properties, you can create anything from an elegant fade in to a WTF-Pixar-would-be-proud effect. One CSS effect somewhere in between is the CSS flip effect, whereby there's...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Optimize Your Links For Print Using CSS — Show The URL

    When moving around from page to page in your trusty browser, you get the benefit of hovering over links and viewing the link's target URL in the status bar. When it comes to page printouts, however, this obviously isn't an option. Most website printouts...

  • By
    MooTools 1.3 Browser Object

    MooTools 1.3 was just released and one of the big additions is the Browser object.  The Browser object is very helpful in that not only do you get information about browser type and browser versions, you can gain information about the user's OS, browser plugins, and...

Discussion

  1. Dave Doyle

    As an aside, if you’re also using any javascript validation, disable the submit button only after you’ve passed the validation tests.

    Also, if the form is output programattically and the results stored in a DB, you can incorporated a unique hidden value in the form and redirect to an error page on duplicate submission detection.

  2. Great tips (and name) Dave!

    I’ve never been a fan of “disabling” elements on a website, but if it can save a developer lots of cleanup in the long run, I say do it.

  3. Hugo

    How would you write a code to “redirect to an error page on duplicate submission detection.”

  4. Hugo

    oh, and my middle name is David. It may not be Dave but it is pretty close. :D

  5. thanks for the tip… might also be a good idea to apply some sort of visual display so your users know the server is working. :)

  6. Rohini

    Hi David,

    I’m having a really hard time trying to disable a submit (IMAGE) button when the page is submitted in APEX 3.2.
    I cannot get the SUBMIT button to disable itself. Somehow this only works on HTML Buttons rather than IMAGES from CSS Templates.
    Would appreciate it if you could suggest an alternative.
    Thanks.

  7. Great way of prevention. Thanks a lot. I just implemented it on one of my websites.

  8. Ava

    Does anyone have a unit test code for testing the submit button disabled when click it?

  9. roshan

    Thank boss..u saved my time

  10. manoj

    i can’t disable the submit button because i have some validation before page submit.if the validation failed the button is permanently disabled please some one assist

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!