Home/ Questions/Q 9247679
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-18T09:47:29+00:00

My intention is to submit data from a form to the server and not

  • 0

My intention is to submit data from a form to the server and not have the page reload. It does not even need to display updated data. I am developing using Firefox and I’m looking at two paths to get what I want:

  1. I’ve discovered that if I place a button inside a form, the form will be submitted with the name of the page containing it as a “GET” request. The form tag in this case has not method attribute and the action tag is empty. I can input the function that I want into the action attribute, and the browser will apply the rest of the form fields to the request. I find the formulation of the form convenient, but the browser goes ahead and replaces the page with whatever the response is from the server, taking me away from the original page.
  2. Taking the button out of the form and wiring it exclusivly to a javascript function allows me to register a function to the onreadystatechange event. This has the effect of running a function rather than reloading the page when the server responds. The down side of this seems to be that it is necessary for the function to formulate the “GET” request on it’s own.

It seems to me that there should be a way for the javascript function to tell the form to submit using it’s own devices, and then be ready to process the the response. Being new at this I am unfamiliar with what “Best Practice” would be for this requirement.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    This is what I’ve Ended up with, going forward with pathway number 2 as described in the original question, The button invoking the script is outside the form, so there is no submit event. Data from the form is harvested by the script as described in this answer to a related question:

    https://stackoverflow.com/a/589100/747544

    From there, the “get” request is formulated by the script

    XMLHttpRequest.open("GET", "/myCommand?"+queryString ,true);
XMLHttpRequest.send(null);

    The form is in effect “scanned” by the script without ever having been submitted, so there is no need to prevent the default behavior with an onSubmit event returning false. or preventDefault().

    • 0