Using HTML5, how do I use contenteditable fields in a form submission? - html

Question

So I have a bunch of paragraph elements which are dynamically populated from a db. I have made the elements contenteditable. I now want to submit edits back the the db via a standard form submission. Is there a way to post the contenteditable elements back?

Answer 1

You have to use javascript one way or the other, it won't work as a "standard" form element as it would with a textarea or the like. If you like, you could make a hidden textarea within your form, and in the form's onsubmit function copy the innerHTML of the contenteditable to the textarea's value. Alternatively you could use ajax/xmlHttpRqeuest to submit the stuff a bit more manually.
function copyContent () {
document.getElementById("hiddenTextarea").value =
document.getElementById("myContentEditable").innerHTML;
return true;
}
<form action='whatever' onsubmit='return copyContent()'>...

Answer 2

If anyone is interested I patched up a solution with VueJS for a similar problem. In my case I have:
<h2 #focusout="updateMainMessage" v-html="mainMessage" contenteditable="true"></h2>
<textarea class="d-none" name="gift[main_message]" :value="mainMessage"></textarea>
In "data" you can set a default value for mainMessage, and in methods I have:
methods: {
updateMainMessage: function(e) {
this.mainMessage = e.target.innerText;
}
}
"d-none" is a Boostrap 4 class for display none.
Simple as that, and then you can get the value of the contenteditable field inside "gift[main_message]" during a normal form submit for example, no AJAX required. I'm not interested in formatting, therefore "innerText" works better than "innerHTML" for me.

Answer 3

Does it NEED to be standard form submission? If you cannot or do not want use a form with inputs, you may try AJAX (XMLHttpRequest + FormData), through which you could perform asynchronous requests and control better how response shows up.
If you want it even simpler, try jQuery's $.ajax function (also $.get and $.post). It sends data using simple JS objects.

Answer 4

Made a fully working example based on Rob's idea:
After hitting submit, the (hidden) textarea is updated with the table-data, in JSON-format.
(return true to submit)
function copyContent() {
const table = [];
$("tr").each(function() {
const row = [];
$("th, td", this).each(function() {
row.push($(this).text());
});
table.push(row);
});
$("#rows").val(JSON.stringify(table));
// return true to submit
return false;
}
<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.3.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<form onsubmit='return copyContent()'>
<textarea name="rows" id="rows" rows="4"></textarea>
<button type="submit">Submit</button>
</form>
<table class="table table-striped">
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Head 1</th>
<th>Head 2</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td contenteditable="true">edit </td>
<td contenteditable="true">me</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td contenteditable="true">please</td>
<td contenteditable="true">😊</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>