Prevent Early Form Submission by Hijacking the Enter Key

By  on  

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.

Recent Features

  • By
    Animated 3D Flipping Menu with CSS

    CSS animations aren't just for basic fades or sliding elements anymore -- CSS animations are capable of much more.  I've showed you how you can create an exploding logo (applied with JavaScript, but all animation is CSS), an animated Photo Stack, a sweet...

  • By
    CSS Filters

    CSS filter support recently landed within WebKit nightlies. CSS filters provide a method for modifying the rendering of a basic DOM element, image, or video. CSS filters allow for blurring, warping, and modifying the color intensity of elements. Let's have...

Incredible Demos

Discussion

  1. Ahmed

    Awesome!

  2. JGM

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

  3. 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. How about the TAB key?

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