Today I came across an interesting bug, which took a good chunk of time to get to the bottom of.
The setup
A form on a page. On submit, the data gets captured and new FormData()
object gets created with it.
That object gets sent with and xhr
request to an .php
script, which then returns an ok
/ error
message.
The code looks something like this: (simplified version, no need for fluff)
<form name="frm" id="frm" action="" method="post" onsubmit="save(event, this);" enctype="multipart/form-data"> <input name="name" id="name" type="text" value="..." /> <input name="email" id="email" type="text" value="..." /> <input name="phone" id="phone" type="text" value="..." /> <input name="website" id="website" type="text" value="..." /> <textarea name="details" id="details"></textarea> <input name="send" type="submit" value="Send" /> </form> <script type="text/javascript"> function save(e, frm) { if (document.getElementById('nume').value == '' || document.getElementById('email').value == '' || document.getElementById('telefon').value == '' || document.getElementById('site').value == '') { alert('Forms empty'); } else { var xhr = window.XMLHttpRequest ? new XMLHttpRequest() : new ActiveXObject('Microsoft.XMLHTTP'); xhr.onreadystatechange = function () { if (xhr.readyState == 4) { var r = JSON.parse(xhr.responseText); if (r.code == 0) { document.getElementById('message_ok').style.display = 'block'; } else { document.getElementById('message_err').style.display = 'block'; } } }; xhr.open('POST', 'http://url', true); var data = new FormData(frm); xhr.send(data); } e.preventDefault(); } </script>
Sending this to .php
will result in an array which kind of looks like this:
Array ( [name] => some name [email] => some email [phone] => 11111111 [website] => some site [details] => some details [send] => Send )
and .php
will respond with either {"message":"ok","code":0}
or {"message":"error","code":1}
Now this is the expected behavior. This is what I get on either Chrome, IE or Safari.
The problem
On Firefox however, I get the same array except without the submit
input (name="send"
) key/value pair:
Array ( [name] => some name [email] => some email [phone] => 11111111 [website] => some site [details] => some details )
I tried on both Linux and Windows, to cover my basis, yet it still gave the same unsatisfying result.
Solution
After searching online and coming up empty, the way I solved it (more of patching, not really solving) was to overwrite the send
key/value:
var data = new FormData(frm); data.append('send', 'Send'); xhr.send(data);
This works, because if it's already defined (Chrome, etc...) it gets overwritten, if it doesn't exist, it gets created.
Questions
- Similar - Have you ever faced something similar?
- Fix - I consider my solution a hack, have you got any ideas for a better fix?