Faking a form submission

[Chris Smith]

Good morning,

Is there a good way to use JavaScript to send a form submission, but get
back the response as a string, rather than loading it into a page? I
could write the code to send the submission via XMLHttpRequest, but that
seems hard... especially implementing multipart-encoded form submission
such as required for file upload.

Ideas?

--
www.designacourse.com
The Easiest Way To Train Anyone... Anywhere.

Chris Smith - Lead Software Developer/Technical Trainer
MindIQ Corporation

[Duncan Booth]

Chris Smith wrote:

Good morning,

Is there a good way to use JavaScript to send a form submission, but get
back the response as a string, rather than loading it into a page? I
could write the code to send the submission via XMLHttpRequest, but that
seems hard... especially implementing multipart-encoded form submission
such as required for file upload.

Ideas?

You might want to have a look at kupu (SVN checkout from
http://codespeak.net/svn/kupu/trunk/kupu) and search for kupu_upload_form.

The form there has a target attribute and is followed by an invisible
iframe with a name matching the target. When the form is submitted, this
means the response comes back into the iframe. The response includes an
onLoad event which calls a javascript method back in the main document to
handle the result or display an error message.

[Chris Smith]

Duncan Booth <du**********@invalid.invalid> wrote:

You might want to have a look at kupu (SVN checkout from
http://codespeak.net/svn/kupu/trunk/kupu) and search for kupu_upload_form.

The form there has a target attribute and is followed by an invisible
iframe with a name matching the target. When the form is submitted, this
means the response comes back into the iframe. The response includes an
onLoad event which calls a javascript method back in the main document to
handle the result or display an error message.

That would work... except that I don't have any control over the form
tag... and the form needs to work as usual when the real submit button
is pressed. I suppose I could temporarily set the target via DOM, and
then put it back after the Form.submit() call... seems kinda kludgy,
though. I'm debating whether that's cleaner than faking the form submit
via XMLHttpRequest.

--
www.designacourse.com
The Easiest Way To Train Anyone... Anywhere.

Chris Smith - Lead Software Developer/Technical Trainer
MindIQ Corporation

[Duncan Booth]

Chris Smith wrote:

Duncan Booth <du**********@invalid.invalid> wrote:

You might want to have a look at kupu (SVN checkout from
http://codespeak.net/svn/kupu/trunk/kupu) and search for
kupu_upload_form.

The form there has a target attribute and is followed by an invisible
iframe with a name matching the target. When the form is submitted,
this means the response comes back into the iframe. The response
includes an onLoad event which calls a javascript method back in the
main document to handle the result or display an error message.

That would work... except that I don't have any control over the form
tag... and the form needs to work as usual when the real submit button
is pressed. I suppose I could temporarily set the target via DOM, and
then put it back after the Form.submit() call... seems kinda kludgy,
though. I'm debating whether that's cleaner than faking the form
submit via XMLHttpRequest.

You may not have to put it back immediately: you just need an onsubmit
handler which works out which way you want to submit the form and direct
the target accordingly.

Alternatively clone the entire form and set the target on the clone. I have
no idea whether you can then submit the clone without adding it into the
DOM. If you can then that would be a nice solution, one call to cloneNode,
set the target and submit.