Question

How to get the first form element (input element) that occurs on a page and set focus to it?
I would like to change the practice where I have to set focus manually in every single page to a certain element like this

$("#Clients").focus()

I want something universal, something that will figure out the first input automatically and put that code into a master page.

Answer 1

You can use the :input and :first selectors with .focus(), like this:

$(function() {
  $(':input:first').focus();
});

Or since you said master page, you may have a certain content area or something, so just prefix that on the selector, for example:

$('#content :input:first').focus();

The :input selectors selects all input, textarea, select and button elements, so it’ll grab the first of any kind of <form> input.