Prevent Early Form Submission by Hijacking the Enter Key
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.
![An Interview with Eric Meyer]()
Your early CSS books were instrumental in pushing my love for front end technologies. What was it about CSS that you fell in love with and drove you to write about it?
At first blush, it was the simplicity of it as compared to the table-and-spacer...
![Create a Sheen Logo Effect with CSS]()
I was inspired when I first saw Addy Osmani's original ShineTime blog post. The hover sheen effect is simple but awesome. When I started my blog redesign, I really wanted to use a sheen effect with my logo. Using two HTML elements and...
![Smooth Scrolling with MooTools Fx.SmoothScroll]()
I get quite a few support requests for my previous MooTools SmoothScroll article and the issue usually boils down to the fact that SmoothScroll has become Fx.SmoothScroll. Here's a simple usage of Fx.SmoothScroll.
The HTML
The only HTML requirement for Fx.SmoothScroll is that all named...
![Add Controls to the PHP Calendar]()
I showed you how to create a PHP calendar last week. The post was very popular so I wanted to follow it up with another post about how you can add controls to the calendar. After all, you don't want your...
Awesome!
Outstanding little clip…one I can put into use almost immediately!
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.
How about the TAB key?