submit button behaviour in IE

Question

Hi

I have a problem in IE. Hitting enter when the focus is on the last input control sends the focus to the "Next" button. This submits the form. So far, so good.

The code in my base class WizardController looks to see if the Next submit button is null, as follows:

        protected string NextButton 
        {
            get 
            { 
                return ControllerContext.HttpContext.Request.Params["NextButton"];Nex
            }
        }

However, despite the form submitting, this property returns null unless the user explicitly clicks on the button with his mouse.

This is blatantly wrong, but I have no idea why it is happening.

EDITED TO SPECIFY THE PRECISE PROBLEM:

The problem only occurs IF there is ONLY one TEXT input control in the HTML form that gets rendered to the browser.

END EDIT

Andrew

Answer 1

A simple work around might be to use a hidden form element and depend on that rather than the button.

<input type='hidden' name='action' value='next' />

If you have multiple buttons you can always use JavaScript to change the value of the action element just before submitting.

Answer 2

I have finally found an explanation for my problem:

It seems to be a bug in IE, whereby if there is a single text input in the rendered HTML form, then IE will not submit the form properly. The issue is described (briefly) at:

Form Submit via Enter Key when using IE

In the above link, no description is given as to why the bug occurs, or since what version of IE, so a blanket solution is better.

The workaround suggested in the article is to add a css hidden text input (with conditionals for IE):

<!--[if IE]>
  <input type="text" style="display: none;" disabled="disabled" size="1" />
<![endif]-->

This worked for me, so issue solved.

The following is included to document the issue as I experienced it:

Unlike the problem described in the article, my form did submit. However, when I tried to check which button had been accessed by hitting tab or enter key, no submit button was in the HttpContext.Request.Params collection. So the behaviour I saw was slightly different.

What the above article did identify is that this behaviour is only seen WHEN there is ONLY one text input control. A single check box, for example, does not cause the problem.

I hope that this documents the problem adequately... and that MS will one day correct the bug.