Question

Using IE 7, JDK 1.6 and Sun Web server 7.

Inside the jsp form, we have:

<input type="text" name="id" maxlength="20" />
<input ... type="submit" name="send" value="Send"/>

i.e. a text box and a “Submit” button (called Send).

and the servlet has:

if (request.getParameter("send") != null && request.getParameter("send").trim().length() > 0) { ... }

Using Fiddler and IE, we can see that the following is sent when we populate the id text box and hit Enter:

id=123456

However, using Fiddler and IE, we can see that the following is sent when we populate the id text box and click the Send button:

userId=123456&send=Send

The end result is that hitting the Enter key effectively does nothing.

On other jsp pages, e.g. we have:

<input type="text" name="id" maxlength="20" />
<input ... type="submit" name="submitId" value="Submit"/>

and the servlet has:

if (request.getParameter("submitId") != null && request.getParameter("submitId").trim().length() > 0) { ... }

Using Fiddler and IE, we can see that the following is sent for both cases:

id=123456&submitId=Submit

So it seems to us that the behaviour is only exhibited on IE for forms where the “Submit” button is not called “Submit”?

Re-running the tests on Firefox 3.6 shows that the behaviour is correct and the same for both cases.

Any suggestions for getting IE to work correctly?

(Note: I have searched SO for a similar problem but the questions relating to this mainly all ASP related!).

Answer 1

This is indeed another IE anomaly in case of forms with only one input field. The only solid workaround for this is to add a second input field(!). You can hide it using CSS. No, type="hidden" ain’t going to work.

<input type="text" name="id" maxlength="20" />
<input type="text" style="display: none;" />
<input type="submit" name="send" value="Send"/>