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
    How I Stopped WordPress Comment Spam

    I love almost every part of being a tech blogger:  learning, preaching, bantering, researching.  The one part about blogging that I absolutely loathe:  dealing with SPAM comments.  For the past two years, my blog has registered 8,000+ SPAM comments per day.  PER DAY.  Bloating my database...

  • By
    CSS vs. JS Animation: Which is Faster?

    How is it possible that JavaScript-based animation has secretly always been as fast — or faster — than CSS transitions? And, how is it possible that Adobe and Google consistently release media-rich mobile sites that rival the performance of native apps? This article serves as a point-by-point...

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!