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Welcome to the David Walsh Blog. I'm a MooTools, Dojo, jQuery, CSS, and PHP Web Developer located in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. Please contact me if I can make your experience on my website better.

Prevent Early Form Submission by Hijacking the Enter Key

10 Responses »

A customer asked me to create a timecard form a few years ago. Everything with the form worked great but users would mistakenly press the enter key before their form was completed. They asked that I make the enter key move the cursor to the next input instead of submitting the form. This is how I'd do that using MooTools JavaScript.

The MooTools JavaScript

var inputs = $$('input.hijack');
$each(inputs,function(el,i) {
	el.addEvent('keypress',function(e) {
		if(e.key == 'enter') { 
			e.stop(); 
			if(inputs[i+1]) { inputs[i+1].focus(); }
			//last one?
			if(i == inputs.length-1) { $('submit-button').focus(); }
		}
	});
});

When the customer hits the enter key, the cursor simply appears in the next input.

While I certainly wouldn't recommend this for every form, it definitely suited this customer's needs.

Discussion

  1. ahmed
    October 13, 2008 @ 3:52 pm

    Awesome!

  2. jgm
    October 14, 2008 @ 6:34 am

    Outstanding little clip…one I can put into use almost immediately!

  3. October 14, 2008 @ 8:44 am

    Agreed! Excellent and well executed idea. As you say, probably not for all forms — and it might be useful to provide some education with respect to the tab key which is for all forms — but useful for critical processes that must not be interrupted. Well done.

  4. January 7, 2010 @ 2:19 pm

    How about the TAB key?

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