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.....
Related
Can someone please tell me what happens behind the scenes in the following case (i.e. explain the whole technical process)?
<form method="get" action="#">
<input type="text" name="d" value="flowers">
<button type="submit">send</button>
</form>
In this case after one has clicks on “send” a new webpage opens saying: "You have searched for "flowers" " and an image of some flowers below.
In the browser tab right after the URL of the newly opened page there is
“/?s=flowers”. What is that?
Thank you in advance for your answers!
When you click Send, the page data specified in the form information and values is passed to the server via HTTP.
The /?s=flowers is the GET data being passed back to the server. Although, based on the form code you've provided, the "name" of that value is d. So the URL would actually have /?d=flowers
The PHP or server side language then handles that information to do specific tasks. It can access the info using the name "d". This method of sending data is called GET, there are also other ways of doing this. The most common, POST, does not display the data in the URL and send the data through HTTP headers.
The code you've shown has an action of "#" which means the HTTP method is being sent the same page. Meaning this page code would have some PHP located in it. This can also be done by using a seperate file, such as action='send.php'
According to the HTML book which I am reading (and according to here: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_form_action.asp) it says that in the case of forms:
<form action="/login/" method="post">
'action' specifies where to send the form data when a form is submitted. The syntax for it could be
<form action="URL">
Now, in the book I am reading, it also talks about a hidden 'next' variable, like so:
<form action="/login/" method="post">
<input type='hidden' name='next' value='/' />
<input type='submit' value='login' />
The book I am reading states that
The form contains a submit button as well as a hidden field called 'next'. This hidden variable contains a URL that tells where to redirect the user after they have logged in.
From my understanding, doesn't 'action' either way tell specify where to redirect to after the form has been submitted? So isn't having the hidden 'next' variable not necessary because 'action' already tells where to redirect to? Which takes priority if action and next are different URLs? Does it redirect to the URL in action or the URL in next?
First up the action attribute has nothing to do with redirection.
When you click a submit button in a form the browser sends an HTTP request to the server, specificaly to the resource mentioned in the action attribute, using either get or post. What happens next is entirely dependant on what you are using server side.
As far as I am aware the presense of a Next property in the request has no special meaning.
Normally when a form is submitted one of two things will happen
The server does some process then return an HTTP Response. This will show the action url in the address bar of the browser
The server does some processing then redirects the user to a new page. This is usualy programmed by you the programmer and does not happen automagicaly. In php you would use http_redirect(someURL). The next hidden field could be used to hold this URL but it won't do anything with it by itself.
On a technical note, http redirects, be they with asp, php, etc cause, an additional round trip to the browser. So in the case of the redirect above, an HTTP Response is send to the broswser with a header indicating to redirect and where to direct to. The browser will then send a new request to the new location. This is why the new address appears in the browser address bar.
Action url is where the page will be redirected to, by default. The value of next has no effect unless you have server side code to do that. Even if you do write code, the redirect will first go to action url and then to any other url you have changed.
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.
The form here works fine in the browser, but for some reason I cannot submit it programmatically.
If I do not enter anything in the form in the browser then when I submit I get a 'Log-In Error'. But If I try sending a POST request to the form action url (with and without parameters) the response is the same page. Why is this?
You probably aren't accounting for all of the <input /> fields. When serializing the form, I get this list of parameters:
__EVENTTARGET=
__EVENTARGUMENT=
__VIEWSTATE=
UserLoginControl%24districtId=
UserLoginControl%24districtName=
UserLoginControl%24UserName=
UserLoginControl%24UserPassword=
UserLoginControl%24district=
districtId=
districtName=
ScreenWidth=
ScreenHeight=
FlashPlayerVersion=
Make sure you set all of them (or guess and check which ones don't mean anything).
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;
});