3.2. Using the Enter Key to Submit a Form After Validation

Problem

You want to use the Enter key to submit the information entered by a user to the server, but your form uses client-side validation that must be performed before the form is submitted.

Solution

Write code that generates some JavaScript that captures the keypress event in the browser, checks to see if the key pressed is the Enter key, performs the client-side validation, and then submits the form.

In the .aspx file, add id and runat attributes to the body element so that all the tag’s contents can be accessed (and modified) in the code-behind:

<body id="pageBody" runat="server"
      leftmargin="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" topmargin="0">

In the code-behind class for the page, use the .NET language of your choice to:

  1. Call the Add method of the pageBody object’s Attributes collection to add the onload attribute to the pageBody control, which causes the captureKeyPress (or equivalently named) client-side script function to be called when the page is first loaded. Your goal is to have HTML like this sent to the browser:

    <body id="pageBody" leftmargin="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" 
      topmargin="0"
onload="captureKeyPress( );">

  2. Build a string containing the client-side JavaScript that is to be executed when the page is loaded and causes it to be output as part of the rendered page; the client-side script must capture the keypress event in the browser, check to see if the key pressed is the Enter key, perform the client-side ...

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