Prevent double submission of forms in jQuery

Question

I have a form that takes a little while for the server to process. I need to ensure that the user waits and does not attempt to resubmit the form by clicking the button agai

Answer 1

event.timeStamp doesn't work in Firefox. Returning false is non-standard, you should call event.preventDefault(). And while we're at it, always use braces with a control construct.

To sum up all of the previous answers, here is a plugin that does the job and works cross-browser.

jQuery.fn.preventDoubleSubmission = function() {

    var last_clicked, time_since_clicked;

    jQuery(this).bind('submit', function(event) {

        if(last_clicked) {
            time_since_clicked = jQuery.now() - last_clicked;
        }

        last_clicked = jQuery.now();

        if(time_since_clicked < 2000) {
            // Blocking form submit because it was too soon after the last submit.
            event.preventDefault();
        }

        return true;
    });
};

To address Kern3l, the timing method works for me simply because we're trying to stop a double-click of the submit button. If you have a very long response time to a submission, I recommend replacing the submit button or form with a spinner.

Completely blocking subsequent submissions of the form, as most of the above examples do, has one bad side-effect: if there is a network failure and they want to try to resubmit, they would be unable to do so and would lose the changes they made. This would definitely make an angry user.