Clearing a text field if nothing is submitted

Question

I don't know if this is even possible, but in my rails app, I have this currently to put text in a text_field to be a description instead of having an external label:

      <% inside = "Search for Customers" %>
      <%= text_field_tag :search, params[:search],
                         :style => "color:#aaa;",
                         :value => inside, #defined above
                         :onfocus => "if(this.getValue()=='#{inside}'){this.clear();this.style.color = '#000';}",
                         :onblur => "if(this.getValue()==''){this.setValue('#{inside}');this.style.color = '#aaa';}" %>
        <%= submit_tag "Search", :name => nil %>

This works great, but if I don't enter anything in, it searches for "Search for Customers", which is not what I intended. Is there a way to fix this?

Thanks

Edit:

I've added a :onSubmit => "if(this.getValue()=='#{inside}'){this.clear();}" to the text_field_tag, but it's still not doing anything. I've also tried :onbeforesubmit and even a simple alert('test') but it's not working for some reason.

Answer 1

Fill inside by params[:search] if define

<% inside = params[:search] || "Search for Customers" %>

Answer 2

Not sure if rails makes it different, but you can usually use:

<form onbeforesubmit="someFunction()">

And then in somefunction() clear the textfield.

Answer 3

There is a new placeholder attribute for inputs in HTML5, it does exactly what your asking for, but wont work for everyone yet.

http://diveintohtml5.org/detect.html#input-placeholder

You could use it and fallback to populating and clearing the field with the onsubmit event for people that have older browsers.

Answer 4

You may also simply ignore the request at the controller level if the search field is blank or if the search parameter corresponds to your inside string, something like:

def search
  if params[:search].blank? || params[:search] == "Search for Customers"
    return
  else
    do_whetever_you_want
  end
end