POST form and prevent response - html

I have the following form:
<form method="post" action="http://domain.com/api.json?param=value"></form>
On submission of this form, this will replace my document with a response from http://domain.com/api.json.
Is it possible to POST this form, but prevent receiving a response, and keep the existing HTML with the form?

Send an HTTP 204 No Content response instead of the usual 200 OK response.
10.2.5 204 No Content
The server has fulfilled the request but does not need to return an
entity-body, and might want to return updated metainformation. The
response MAY include new or updated metainformation in the form of
entity-headers, which if present SHOULD be associated with the
requested variant.
If the client is a user agent, it SHOULD NOT change its document view
from that which caused the request to be sent. This response is
primarily intended to allow input for actions to take place without
causing a change to the user agent's active document view, although
any new or updated metainformation SHOULD be applied to the document
currently in the user agent's active view.
The 204 response MUST NOT include a message-body, and thus is always
terminated by the first empty line after the header fields.

You could just use AJAX (XMLHttpRequest in this example) to submit the post
var xmlhttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
xmlhttp.open("POST", "http://domain.com/api.json?param=value", true);
xmlhttp.send(null);
Before hand, if you need. You can grab your param value and encode it:
var val = encodeURIComponent(document.getElementById("param").value);
then the second line would be more like:
xmlhttp.open("POST", "http://domain.com/api.json?param="+val, true);
Otherwise, any sort of submitting from a form will load a page. A hack would be to put it in a iframe thats hidden, and just delete the iframe when done.

Related

HTML Form to Remove ?get=info on POST Submit?

I have several pages that are arrived on with valid GET data, such as http://website.com/?id=12345
I have a generic HTML form that is pulled onto many different pages using php's "require" and submits using POST. Regardless of which page this form is located on, it should always submit back to that same page. However, after the form is submitted, I would like the ?id=12345 to be stripped out.
So, for example, if the user is on http://website.com/new.php?id=12345, it should post back to http://website.com/new.php. If the user is on http://website.com/old.php?id=12345, that same form it should post back to old.php
Previously the best solution I found was to style the form as such:
<form action="?" method="POST">
Which will change all links to http://website.com/new.php? or http://website.com/old.php? which is very close, but not perfect.
As it turns out, I finally found the solution to my problem by using JavaScript:
url = location.href;
qindex = url.indexOf("?");
This can pull whatever is on the address bar as a string and find the index of the first ? mark. From there:
if(qindex != -1)
tells me that there is a ? mark
var plainUrl = url.substring(0, qindex);
Can get, as a string, everything up to the ? mark, but not after. Finally:
window.location.replace(plainUrl);
Will rewrite the address bar to the plain URL, not including the ? or whatever comes after, and without redirecting the browser.
Since your page will not undergo any server-side processing, you can achieve what you want via a combination of the following two tricks.
First, change your particular querystring to a hash, which is thereafter directly editable without triggering a page reload:
http://yourdomain.com/page.html#search=value
Then modify such a script as this to do what you want to do, according to the query string passed in.
<script type='text/javascript'>
// grab the raw "querystring"
var query = document.location.hash.substring(1);
// immediately change the hash
document.location.hash = '';
// parse it in some reasonable manner ...
var params = {};
var parts = query.split(/&/);
for (var i in parts) {
var t = part[i].split(/=/);
params[decodeURIComponent(t[0])] = decodeURIComponent(t[1]);
}
// and do whatever you need to with the parsed params
doSearch(params.search);
</script>
now you can delete the query string suffix in the following way:
As detailed elsewhere, namely hide variables passed in URL, it's possible to use JavaScript's History API in modern browsers.
history.replaceState({}, null, "/index.html");
That will cause your URL to appear as /index.html without reloading the page
This little gem is explained in more detail here:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/History_API

passing header to html form

In Java I am able to specify http header using
client = new DefaultHttpClient();
HttpGet get = new HttpGet(url);
get.addHeader(key, value);
Now I need to create an html form, how do I pass the same data information?
You cannot, with pure HTML, cause the user's browser to send a particular header (other than Post-Data and so on).
If you need to send HTTP headers you'll have to use a Javascript XMLHTTPRequest or other dynamic device. See this SO question.

How to submit data from an html page forcing the browser keeps the page unchanged

First let me set the situation.
I am writing a simple client html page and a simple server side program.
In detail, the page has a submit button to POST some data to the server program.
The problem is that any time I test the page to push the submit button ,the browser displays the new page which displays only the return message my server program returned.
How can I modify the html or the server side program so that the browser keeps the page unchanged before after the submit button is pushed.
I know an easiest way ; letting the sever program returns the same string as the client html page.
Thank you in advance.
In a regular form submission, your page will be whatever the server sends back. The form's action might be the same page, and then your server-side code can read the value of any input fields, and set the values in the response back to what they were in the request. This should result in the page looking the same as it did before the submit button was pressed. However, the page has "changed" in the sense that it was reloaded.
Alternatively, your form can make an Ajax request, which means that you'd need to use Javascript to intercept and stop the form submission, and then use additional coding to send the Ajax request, and then receive and process the response.
What you want is probably a postback:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postback
1.) AJAX
You could use JavaScript and AJAX to POST the data.
2.) IFrame (not recommended)
You could also create a hidden IFrame and set the target attribute of the form to it.
What you want to do doesn't seem to be very clear.
If you want to submit your POST data without loading a new web page, you can use Ajax. It may be simple to do it in jQuery, and even simpler if you serialize your form data.
$('form').submit(function() {
$.post('your-post-url',$(this).serialize(),function(data) {
alert('Data posted!');
});
return false;
});

Is there a way to ignore form response?

Is there a way to specify a form either through type or action url to not open the response? In other words I would like to send the info to the server, but not do anything on the client. I know I can use ajax and ignore the response, but I would like to avoid adding all the js to my code if possible.
Edit: I didn't mean to limit myself to the html form. In my case server side solutions were also acceptable.
Have the server return HTTP 204 (No Content) after the form submission. According to the HTTP 1.1 spec:
10.2.5 204 No Content
The server has fulfilled the request
but does not need to return an
entity-body, and might want to return
updated metainformation. The response
MAY include new or updated
metainformation in the form of
entity-headers, which if present
SHOULD be associated with the
requested variant.
If the client is a user agent, it
SHOULD NOT change its document view
from that which caused the request to
be sent. This response is primarily
intended to allow input for actions to
take place without causing a change to
the user agent's active document view,
although any new or updated
metainformation SHOULD be applied to
the document currently in the user
agent's active view.
The 204 response MUST NOT include a
message-body, and thus is always
terminated by the first empty line
after the header fields.
This sounds like exactly what you want.
try this:
<iframe id="invisible" ...
<form target="invisible" ...
I found that name attribute should be specified as well (I tested in IE11). E.g:
<iframe id="invisible" name="invisible" style="display:none;"></iframe>
<form method="post" target="invisible" action="url.com/whatever?x=y" id="fileForm" enctype="multipart/form-data">
With ASP.NET you could have a page that processes the form post and simply end the response right away, this will leave the user at the same page.
However, no response to the user at all is not the best user experience.....

Mootools Request to change javascript code?

So I am planning on dynamically changing a page's content by fetching it from another page.
To do so, I used Mootools' Request class:
var tabContent = new Request({
url: 'foo/bar/baz.php',
onSuccess: function(data) {
$('tab_container').innerHTML = data;
}
}).send();
In any case, the HTML is fetched fine, and returns without a hitch. However, I'd like to add some events to THOSE fetched elements (Fx.slide, to be precise), and that requires some js to be included in the requested file.
Upon inspection of the returned data, the javascript is intact. However, it does not show up in the final product. That is, somewhere in between having received the data, and rendering the data (via the innerHTML bit) it seems as though the javascript has been excised out for some reason.
Hm.
add evalScripts: true to the Request options, then include the script in a simple <script></script> block at the bottom of the response.