Question

I have a page with a form and navigation links. If you click on a navigation link I need to submit the form as well as follow the navigation request.

To do this I have a link who’s href is pointing to the new page request and I have the onclick event bound to a function that submits the form on the page.

Could this scenario cause hard to reproduce problems of the form not submitting?

ex:

function submitForm(){
document.myform.submit();
}

<a href="page1.html" onclick="submitForm()">Back To page 1</a>
<form action="procsub" method="post"><input type="text" id="val1" /></form>

Answer 1

Submitting a form basically means reloading the page (targeting the same page, or a different one, as defined in the form). following a link is also a means of reloading the page.

what you could do would be to modify your submitForm function like so:

function submitForm(a) {
    document.myform.action += '?redirectPage=' + a.href; // given that action doesn't already contain querystrings
    document.myform.submit();
}

and

<a href="page1.html" onclick="submitForm(this);">Back to page 1</a>

And then have the page that handles the form request, do the postback to whichever page was being passed as redirectPage.

A form submit is really not what the user expects when clicking ‘back to page 1’ tho. you may want to think this through one more time…