"Silent" Form Processing using Ajax Technology

My goal is to send form data to the server without refreshing the page or displaying updated information. I am currently working with Firefox and exploring two approaches:

  1. By placing a button inside a form, I discovered that the form will be submitted as a "GET" request using the name of the page it's on. If I leave out the method attribute in the form tag and keep the action tag empty, I can input the desired function into the action attribute. However, after submitting the form, the browser replaces the original page with the response from the server.
  2. If I remove the button from the form and connect it directly to a JavaScript function, I can assign a function to the onreadystatechange event. This approach ensures that the function runs instead of reloading the page upon receiving a server response. The drawback here is that the function must independently formulate the "GET" request.

I believe there should be a way for the JavaScript function to instruct the form to submit using its own methods, while also being prepared to handle the response. As a newcomer to this technology, I'm unsure what the best practice would be in this scenario.

Answer №1

If you want to submit your information, a simple <button> will do the trick.

function sendRequest(url, parameters) {
    xmlhttp.open("POST", url, false);
    xmlhttp.setRequestHeader("Content-type","application/x-www-form-urlencoded");
    xmlhttp.send(parameters);
    return xmlhttp.responseText;
}

In this scenario, the url parameter represents the address of relevant code, while parameters is a list of name-value pairs separated by &.

Best regards, Westie

Answer №2

To prevent the browser from posting a form, you can include an "onsubmit" function.

Make sure to either return false or call event.preventDefault() within this function to halt the submission process.

Here is an example of how to implement this in your HTML:

<form onsubmit="javascript:myFunction()">
    ...
</form>

And here is the corresponding script:

function myFunction(evt) {
    // Perform necessary actions...
    evt.preventDefault();
}

Answer №3

If you are looking to implement autocomplete suggestions using AJAX, you may not necessarily need a "Submit" button:

By utilizing the Onfocus event and sending form data to the server side, you can achieve autocomplete functionality with server side responses. This approach can enhance user experience and provide real-time suggestions.

For more information on tracking onchange events as users type in a text input, you can refer to this helpful link.

Answer №4

In the progress of my project, I have come to a conclusion where I am proceeding with pathway number 2 as outlined in the initial question. The button triggering the script is located outside the form, eliminating the need for a submit event. Data from the form is gathered by the script, similar to an answer provided for a related query:

https://example.com/a/12345/67890

Subsequently, the script formulates a "get" request like this:

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

The script effectively scans the form without requiring submission, negating the necessity to prevent default behavior with an onSubmit event returning false or preventDefault().

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