Is it improper to duplicate a form repeatedly on a page? - javascript

We currently have a form to sign up for our services on our page. It doesn't actually submit; we prevent the default event and then run through a series of checks, make an AJAX request, and redirect to a thank you page (or display an error message/try again).
We then decided to add the form two more times (once at the bottom of the page and one more time popping up in a modal). Is this inappropriate?
In our current state, we have the error of multiple elements using the same ID. Knowing this is bad, I've found a workaround: Possible to associate label with checkbox without using "for=id"?. The problem is even without the ID error, I'm not entirely sure having three of the exact same forms on the page is appropriate still.
How should I handle duplicate CTA's on the same page?

Related

Handling multiple HTML submit button presses from form in WordPress

So I’m running a WordPress site and it has a form I have made using HTML with a text field, an email field, a password field, and a submit button.
The problem is that users can spam the submit button, and users are occasionally prone to do that as I’m using AJAX to handle the form submission which can take a while.
Any elegant solutions would be good. I have a few suggestions I think could work but I’m not sure how to implement them, if they will actually work, or if they’re even viable.
First possibility I’m thinking of — when WordPress loads a new page, it often has the swirly loading screen with a grey background. could I have the loading screen come on prematurely, as in at the point when I run any AJAX code, too, rather than just when it changes page?
Second possibility I’m thinking of — is there a way to block all of the form fields and the submit button from being pressed as soon as you click it so it cannot be spammed and fields cannot be changed? Could this work via JavaScript (sorry not the best with JS)?
Third possibility I’m thinking of — is there a way that the system only accepts one form from an IP in the space of 5-10 seconds and any other submissions of a POST request in that cooldown time are ignored?
Would any of the above solutions work or be viable enough to work? If so, how would or could they work? I’m thinking the second one is probably the easiest to implement? However, wouldn’t the first one confirm to the user that we’re processing their data so it’d be better for the UX?
Fourth possibility that considers UX and the solution I feel is more practical — is there a way to block the submit buttons and input fields from being pressed or edited once the submit button has been pressed once, and then have a swirly loading bar appear below or above it (maybe via CSS and HTML?) so users know the site is doing something or loading?
Something just to note — the change must be client side only and the change should not affect the user if they come back to the page in future, meaning it should not remain blocked if they refresh the page or come back to it later. I know it’s implied, but wanted just to specify that.
Since you're doing this as an AJAX request, i imagine you currently have some javascript tied to the onsubmit event. Most likely this function of yours encodes the data to JSON and then sends it to the server using ajax.
One way you could accomplish this, is:
Introduce a new variable in the global scope (so outside of the onsubmit-handler); like var submission_cache = ''; or the like.
Next, inside your onsubmit handler, between the stage where you have 'encoded the entire form to a single json string' and the stage where you 'actually send the data', you compare the json to the submission_cache variable. If it matches you ignore the submission, if it doesn't match then you store a copy of the json (or a sha1 checksum of it) in submission_cache, and then just continue with the ajax stuff.
This way:
Since it is a variable on the page, the cache has the same lifetime as the page. If they leave your site and return later, the variable will be empty again, and they can submit identical info as the last time.
Secondly, if they notice they made a typo 1ms after they submitted, they can resubmit (since the cache wont match), which i imagine is desirable.
Another solution that you could use in addition to the above is to simply enable the disabled attribute on the submit button (inside your onsubmit handler function. Re-enable it after a setTimeout or in one of your ajax onreceived/onerror closures.

Reload partial and retain form values

When purchasing a course, the user can enter 1 or more students to register for the course. By default there is only one entry but the user can use a dropdown to select more and then the form will update to show more.
I am accomplishing this by triggering an event when the user changes the dropdown value that uses ajax to call an action which returns a partial with the appropriate number of entries and then I just replace the existing div with the new one.
My question is whether there is a way to implement this so that it's kind of like "refreshing" the page where the form remembers and automatically refills in he values the user already entered just like if you were to refresh the entire webpage. Is there a way to do this, or will I need to pass in the existing values into the action in my ajax call and have the partial set them?
A secondary question I just thought of (and perhaps this should be in another post but I will go ahead and put it here for now) is whether I should be concerned about any weird behavior with validation when doing it this way? (I'm using stock, built in validation with annotations).

Can I keep fields in a form populated even if I move to a different page and then back?

I am currently looking at creating a form using HTML, CSS and a bit of JavaScript. I was wondering though if anyone had any ideas how I could keep all the fields populated?
I want to be able to fill in a form and click 'Next' which will go to a different page with a different form. But if the user presses the 'Back' button to edit some information on the previous page for example, how would I keep all the fields populates?
Bit stumped on this, so any suggestions would be appreciated :)
You may use localStorage or cookies for that purpose to store content of the page on the client' side.
See https://stackoverflow.com/a/27273657/696034 for an example; in you case, you call save() when receiving location change event, and load() on the page' initialization.

JavaScript auto-POST with NAME

I have an OnBase e-Form that I'm building. There are three buttons on the form that all submit. OnBase does different things based on the name of the button used to submit the form. If the button has a name of OBBtn_CrossReference it opens another window with a cross referenced document. I need to programmatically 'click' that button.
I've read several posts about how to use JavaScript to submit a form, but none seem to accomplish my goal. I just need to POST and to have it appear to come from a button named OBBtn_CrossReference.
I don't need to submit any data. The way the page is currently set up, the entire page is already a form and since I don't want to break the functionality of the other form buttons it seems I must leave it that way.
UPDATE:
The suggestion below was tested as a call from the onload event in the body tag and since the button posts the page reloads and the call is made over and over again spawning unlimited child windows. I would appreciate a suggestion on how to get the button to only be clicked the first time the page is loaded and not on postback.
There's a click() method on links, buttons, checkboxes. For example , I submitted this comment by running document.getElementById('submit-button').click() from chrome's command line.
I know I am a little late to this post, but you can try and leverage a cookie to get this done:
if (document.cookie.indexOf('xref=true', 0) < 0) {
// Set the xRef cookie, so we do not fire it again for this form.
document.cookie = 'xref=true';
//alert(document.cookie);
document.getElementById("OBBtn_CrossReference").click();
}
else {
document.cookie = "xref=false";
//alert(document.cookie);
}
I tested this on the Thick and Thin clients in 10.0 and it worked fine.
The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent my company's positions, strategies or opinions.

Dynamic form submission using javascript - how to elegant code?

Here is the problem:
My page displays a set of items. Each item has a check box associated to it (which is part of a form). User might check any of these check boxes and press 'Delete' button. The same page also has a 'Upload' button which would upload an excel sheet of items.
At the moment, my form action sumbits to say : "xyzAction" and I have two different handlers (analogous to Struts Action) - one for deletion of stores and other for uploading stores.
I am told that the best way to do this is to rely on javascript by doing one of these:
1)) Switching form action on press of upload and delete buttons - there by invoke different actions.
2) Use a hidden variable "act" to set it to delete / upload and submit to a single form. The server side action would take care of identifying the act and forwarding to the corresponding action.
Approach (1) - seems very inelegant to me. Playing with form action seems unnecessary.
Approach (2) - would obviously not work if your javascript is turned off and is not very elegant either.
There must be a third way to doing this?, which would make me happy?
It sounds like you may need two different forms, for the two different actions.
You need to get the HTML correct first.
You have two different actions, so you should have two forms - a good rule of thumb is that each form should only have one submit button. This is the best practice for HTML and will ensure that the page works without JS or any other trickery.
Once you have the page working like this, use JS to manipulate the DOM to produce the UI that you need. This is using JS to add behvour to the UI and is best practice for unobtrusive JS.
(If you really want to conflate your actions in a single form, changing the action of the form with JS is the best course of action. But consider what would happen if a user checks a check box and then changes their mind and uploads a file leaving the checkbox checked. You should take care that this shouldn't delete anything.)

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