Submit form using AJAX and jQuery

Question

It seems like this should be something built into jQuery without the need for more than a few lines of code, but I can't find the "simple" solution. Say, I have an HTML form:

<form method="get" action="page.html">
    <input type="hidden" name="field1" value="value1" />
    <input type="hidden" name="field2" value="value2" />
    <select name="status">
         <option value=""></option>
         <option value="good">Good</option>
         <option value="bad">Bad</option>
    </select>
</form>

When someone changes the select field, I would like to submit the form using ajax to update the database. I thought there would be some way to do the following without manually creating the values/attributes, just send them all, like:

$("select").change(function(){
    $.get("page.html?" + serializeForm());
});

What am I missing?

Answer 1

There is a nice form plugin that allows you to send an HTML form asynchroniously.

$(document).ready(function() { 
    $('#myForm1').ajaxForm(); 
});

or

$("select").change(function(){
    $('#myForm1').ajaxForm();
});

to submit the form immediately

Answer 2

First give your form an id attribute, then use code like this:

$(document).ready( function() {
  var form = $('#my_awesome_form');

  form.find('select:first').change( function() {
    $.ajax( {
      type: "POST",
      url: form.attr( 'action' ),
      data: form.serialize(),
      success: function( response ) {
        console.log( response );
      }
    } );
  } );

} );

So this code uses .serialize() to pull out the relevant data from the form. It also assumes the select you care about is the first one in the form.

For future reference, the jQuery docs are very, very good.

Answer 3

This is what ended up working.

$("select").change(function(){
    $.get("/page.html?" + $(this).parent("form").find(":input").serialize()); 
});