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
    5 HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed

    When you say or read "HTML5", you half expect exotic dancers and unicorns to walk into the room to the tune of "I'm Sexy and I Know It."  Can you blame us though?  We watched the fundamental APIs stagnate for so long that a basic feature...

  • By
    Facebook Open Graph META Tags

    It's no secret that Facebook has become a major traffic driver for all types of websites.  Nowadays even large corporations steer consumers toward their Facebook pages instead of the corporate websites directly.  And of course there are Facebook "Like" and "Recommend" widgets on every website.  One...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Web Notifications API

    Every UI framework has the same set of widgets which have become almost essential to modern sites: modals, tooltips, button varieties, and notifications.  One problem I find is each site having their own widget colors, styles, and more -- users don't get a consistent experience.  Apparently the...

  • By
    Introducing MooTools Templated

    One major problem with creating UI components with the MooTools JavaScript framework is that there isn't a great way of allowing customization of template and ease of node creation. As of today, there are two ways of creating: new Element Madness The first way to create UI-driven...

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!