Question

I am looking at writing a jquery plugin that takes a number of input elemts such as input elements, textareas, select html elements etc and once the enter key is pressed in any of the above items, a input button is triggered. As such, the button is set as the default for the fields. Any tips on doing this?

Answer 1

The first input type="submit"/"image"/button type="submit" in a form is the ‘default’ submit button.

If the button you want to act as default should not appear first on the page, then move it around with eg. floats or positioning. Or, if that’s not practical, simply have an extra dummy submit button as the first thing in the form, using position: absolute; left: -lots to make it effectively invisible. (You can use tabindex to stop it coming up in the normal tab order; don’t use display: none or visibility: hidden as in some browsers that’ll stop the button being considered for default.) Catch the default button/submit action from the form.onsubmit event and any other non-default buttons on their own onclick events.

This is a bit of an ugly hack, and it’s certainly a pity that HTML provides no way to change the default button naturally, but you are much better off leveraging native browser behaviour here than trying to replace it with scripting, which is trickier than you think. There are a lot of funny little browser behaviours that can trip you up.

For example, if you decide to catch the Enter keypress, you may get unwanted Enter events from users using IMEs. Enter keypresses on an input type="button" or textarea generally shouldn’t trigger submit. Enter keypress on a select probably should, except when the keyboard is being used to navigate the dropdown (and you can’t reliably tell when that’s happened). What if a non-field element inside the form gets focused and Enter is pressed? You won’t catch it and in some browsers this will cause a form submit, without your code’s intervention, ending up at the default button anyway. Does Shift-Enter or Ctrl-Enter mean submit in a text field? in a text area? Does Enter on a checkbox check it, submit the form, or both? …

Browsers have many subtly different behaviours here; you’ll go mad trying to cover every last little possibility, and whatever you decide on will probably go against the user’s expected behaviour. Let the browser’s normal default-form-submit code handle it instead.