jQuery: performing some action before form is submitted

Question

I have a page with a single form on it. The form contains a text box and a submit button.

When the form is submitted, either by clicking the button, or by pressing enter in the textbox, I want to do a lookup (in this case, geocoding a postcode using Bing Maps), and then submit the form to the server, as usual.

My current approach is to add a handler for the submit event to the one-and-only form, and then call submit() when I've finished, but I can't get this to work, and haven't been able to debug the problem:

$(document).ready(function () {
    $("form").submit(function (event) {
        var postcode = $.trim($("#Postcode").val());
        if (postcode.length === 0) {
            return false;
        }

        var baseUrl = "http://dev.virtualearth.net/REST/v1/Locations/UK/";
        var apiKey = "myKey";
        var url = baseUrl + postcode + "?key=" + apiKey + "&jsonp=?";
        $.getJSON(url, function (result) {
            if (result.resourceSets[0].estimatedTotal > 0) {
                var location = result.resourceSets[0].resources[0].point.coordinates;
                $("#latitude").val(location[0]);
                $("#longitude").val(location[1]);
                $("form").submit();
            }
        });
    });
});

Answer 1

event.preventDefault() is your friend here. You are basically experiencing the same problem as here. The form is submitted before the actual ajax request can be done. You need to halt the form submission, then do the ajax, and then do the form submission. If you don't put some stops in there, it'll just run through it and the only thing it'll have time to do is to submit the form.

 $(document).ready(function () {
        $("form").submit(function (event) {

// prevent default form submit
    event.preventDefault();
            var postcode = $.trim($("#Postcode").val());
            if (postcode.length === 0) {
                return false;
            }


            var baseUrl = "http://dev.virtualearth.net/REST/v1/Locations/UK/";
            var apiKey = "myKey";
            var url = baseUrl + postcode + "?key=" + apiKey + "&jsonp=?";
            $.getJSON(url, function (result) {
                if (result.resourceSets[0].estimatedTotal > 0) {
                    var location = result.resourceSets[0].resources[0].point.coordinates;
                    $("#latitude").val(location[0]);
                    $("#longitude").val(location[1]);
                    $("form").submit();
                }
            });
        });
    });

Howevern, when you put the preventDefault in there you can't continue the form submission with $('form').submit(); anymore. You need to send it as an ajax request, or define a conditional to the preventDefault.

Something like this perhaps:

$(document).ready(function () {

    var submitForReal = false;
        $("form").submit(function (event) {

            var postcode = $.trim($("#Postcode").val());
            if (postcode.length === 0) {
                return false;
            }
    // prevent default form submit
    if(!submitForReal){
    event.preventDefault();
    }else{



            var baseUrl = "http://dev.virtualearth.net/REST/v1/Locations/UK/";
            var apiKey = "myKey";
            var url = baseUrl + postcode + "?key=" + apiKey + "&jsonp=?";
            $.getJSON(url, function (result) {
                if (result.resourceSets[0].estimatedTotal > 0) {
                    var location = result.resourceSets[0].resources[0].point.coordinates;
                    $("#latitude").val(location[0]);
                    $("#longitude").val(location[1]);
                    submitForReal = true;
                    $("form").submit();
                }
            });
          }
        });
    });