Handle user hitting 'Enter' key in a ASP.NET MVC web site

Question

I am working on a ASP.NET MVC web site that has multiple submit buttons. i.e.

    
    &         


        

Answer 1

First off, this is wrong:

<input type="submit" name="SubmitButton" value="Reset" />
<input type="submit" name="SubmitButton" value="OK" />
<input type="submit" name="SubmitButton" value="Back" />

All three of them are submit buttons. A reset is an input of type="reset". Get that sorted. Second of all, I've successfully implemented something like that, and it works on IE6. Try this:

    function keypressHandler(e)
    {
        if(e.which == 13) {
            e.preventDefault(); //stops default action: submitting form
            $(this).blur();
            $('#SubmitButton').focus().click();//give your submit an ID
        }
    }

    $('#myForm').keypress(keypressHandler);

The focus() part makes the button appear to be pressed when the user presses enter. Quite nifty.

Answer 2

Change button order in source but not visually (ie, use CSS to swap the buttons)?

Answer 3

Use this.

$(function(){
    $('input').keydown(function(e){
        if (e.keyCode == 13) {
            $("input[value='OK']").focus().click();
            return false;
        }
    });
});

Answer 4

You should only have one submit button. The reset button should be type="reset" and the back button should probably be type="button" like this:

<input type="reset" name="ResetButton" value="Reset" />
<input type="submit" name="SubmitButton" value="OK" />
<input type="button" name="BackButton" value="Back" />

Then, Reset and OK will just work the way they are supposed to and you'll only need to handle the Back button click with Javascript.

Edit: The other option would be to place the Reset and Back submit buttons each in their own forms inside iframes. Then they would be ignored by the main form and wouldn't be default buttons. Also, this would allow you to point them to different server actions if needed and there wouldn't be any reliance on Javascript for the button actions.

Answer 5

HTML standard seems to specify that the first submit button will be assumed if a user press the 'Enter' key.

No, the usage of the enter key isn't defined, it's a propritary extension that's been added under various interpretations. You will get different behavoir in different browsers (and it can become very dangerous when you start mixing in different cultural or UI conventions about left to right/right to left ordering of options).

If there is only 1 button on the form then all the mainstream browsers happen to follow the same behavior - they submit the form as if that button was pressed (a buttonName=buttonValue is included with the form data). Of course this doesn't mean the buttons onclick handler is going to fire - that behavoir is browser specific.

When there are several buttons it's a complete crap shoot. Some browsers decide that the first button (and the definition of first can vary - most use the first one mentioned in the Html tree, while others attempt to use screen position) was clicked and use it in the submission, while other browsers (notably some versions of IE) make the equally correct assumption that no specific button was pressed, and so don't include a buttonName=buttonValue (the rest of the form is submitted fine).

Answer 6

Since you use jquery, if you use hotkeys plugin, you can make a such approach:

$(document).bind('keydown', 'return', function (evt){
    $.next("input[value='OK']").trigger("click");
    return false;
});