Do Not Load Page After Form Submit - html

Question

I have created a basic HTML contact form using cgimail and everything works, but I can't get it to keep from redirecting somewhere after the form is submitted. I'm trying to instead use a bootstrap alert at the top of the page.
How do I get the form to submit, then keep it from redirecting?
here's the code:
<form method="post" action="/cgi-bin/cgiemail/forms/email.txt">
<fieldset>
<h2 id="contact-header">Contact</h2>
<label>Name:</label>
<input type="text" name="yourname" placeholder="" autofocus>
<label>Email Address:</label>
<input type="email" name="email" value="" placeholder="">
<label>Phone:</label>
<input type="tel" name="phone" value="" placeholder="">
<label>Message:</label>
<textarea name="message" rows="2"></textarea>
<br>
<button type="submit" id="formSubmit" class="btn">Send</button>
<input type="hidden" name="success" value="">
</fieldset>
</form>
Thanks,
Ryan

Answer 1

The "action" attribute in your form is telling it to send the browser over to that email.txt, which would then have control over whether or not to redirect you to another page. By default it would at least redirect you to the email.txt page for the post, but odds are cgi is doing extra stuff when posting to that page.
Using jQuery AJAX, you can do the following (this code skips error checking):
$('form').submit(function() {
var data = { };
data.yourname = $(this).find('input[name="yourname"]').val();
data.message = $(this).find('textarea[name="message"]').val();
// do the same as above for each form field.
$.post("/cgi-bin/cgiemail/forms/email.txt", data, function() {
//add the alert to the form.
$('body').prepend('div class="alert">Success!</div>');
});
return false;
});

Answer 2

You have two straight-forward choices. You can use jQuery and its forms plugin to turn this into an ajax operation or you can roll your own equivalent. It would look something like this (using jQuery):
$('form').submit(function() {
... get all values.
... ajax post the values to the server.
return false;
});

Answer 3

If you're using jQuery, then you could try cancelling the submit event. First give your form an id
HTML:
<form id="myform" ...
JavaScript:
$('#myform').on('submit', function(e) {
e.preventDefault();
$.ajax({
url: '/cgi-bin/cgiemail/forms/email.txt',
type: 'post',
data: $(this).serialize()
});
return false;
});