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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T06:33:46+00:00

I’m trying to change the value of a text input field based on user

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I’m trying to change the value of a text input field based on user actions. I’m doing it like this:

document.getElementById(textFieldID).value = newValue;

It isn’t quite working — the original text in the field remains on the screen, unchanged. However, when I submit the form, it behaves as though the value was indeed changed correctly. (And a debug alert confirms that yup, I’m hitting that bit of the code and passing in the right field ID and text value.) Anybody have any insights? Is there something I need to be doing to redraw the input element?

Edit: Per Jeff B’s request, and per the fact that this seems to have everybody stumped, here’s some relevant bits of code:


<script LANGUAGE="JavaScript" TYPE="text/javascript">
   function changeText(changeSelector)
   {
      var myindex  = document.getElementById(changeSelector+"Recent").selectedIndex;
      var SelValue = document.getElementById(changeSelector+"Recent").options[myindex].value;
      document.getElementById(changeSelector).value = SelValue;
      document.getElementById("historicalText").value = SelValue;
      document.getElementById("historicalTextSelect").value = changeSelector;
   }
</script>

<input onChange="updateScrollingPreview1217(this); return true;" type="text" id="crawlMsg1217" name="crawlMsg1217" size="60" maxlength="1000" value="">

<select id="crawlMsg1217Recent" name="crawlMsg1217Recent" onchange="javascript:changeText('crawlMsg1217');">
[options go here]
</select>

And that “onChange” handler isn’t what’s gumming up the works; I get the same behavior with or without it.

Edit 2: It looks like the problem is being caused by “JSpell”, a third-party spelling checker our product uses. (I’m told that clients prefer using it to a spellcheck built into the browser; go figure.) It appears to be slightly misconfigured on my test machine, so I’m going to try straightening that out and praying that it makes the problems go away. If it doesn’t … should be interesting.

Edit 3: Yup. Fscking JSpell. Just posted a complete answer for the sake of posterity, will accept it tomorrow when I’m allowed. My thanks to everybody who tried to help; +1’s all around, wish I could give more.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I have confirmed that the culprit is indeed JSpell, and that the precise trouble spot is this line:

    window.onload=jspellInit;

    Despite the prayers mentioned in Edit 2 above, making sure it was configured correctly did NOT make the problem go away. And this line is indispensable to JSpell’s functionality. I don’t know if JSpell always hoses Javascript functionality this way, or if there’s some sort of perfect storm of factors that’s causing it to pick a fight with my page, but that is indeed the source of my problems.

    My thanks to everybody who tried to help. This was obviously a bit of a no-win in terms of getting the right answer, since it was caused by a component that was seemingly entirely unrelated and thus didn’t get mentioned by me, but you at least confirmed that I was (in theory) doing things right and not simply going insane.

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