Question

I have a text box in my page which the user will type something to submit. However, I do not want to have a submit button but instead I want to listen for the Enter key press in order to submit.

The thing is, there will be couple of textboxes in this one page and I only want to submit the textbox that has just been typed into.

I know how to find out which key was pressed using jquery but I think in my scenario, I need to see if the cursor was inside a specific textbox. is this right? if so, how is this achieved using jquery? In general is my approach ok? or should I definitely have a submit button?

kem…

Answer 1

Please be aware this is considered bad practice; not only are you going to restrict the submission only to people with JS enabled, people expect to have a submit button to their forms. It’s how the web works. The proper way of doing this is to have a form for each of your textboxes.

That being said, if you had a set of text fields:

<input type='text' name='x1' class='onenter'>
<input type='text' name='x2' class='onenter'>
<input type='text' name='x3' class='onenter'>

You could do this with jQuery:

$(function() {
    $('input.onenter').keyup(function(e) {
        if(e.keyCode == 13) {
            // enter was pressed, do whatever
            // $(this) is the current textbox
        }
    });
});

“whatever” could be an asynchronous request or an actual form submission, depending on your needs.