Disable button on form submission

Question

I have a button that I would like to disable when the form submits to prevent the user submitting multiple times.

I have tried naively disabling the button with java

Answer 1

The correct (as far as user-friendliness is concerned, at least) way would be to disable the button using the OnClientClick attribute, perform the client-side validation, and then use the result of that to continue or re-enable the button.

Of course, you should ALSO write server-side code for this, as you cannot rely on the validation even being carried out due to a lack, or particular implementation, of JavaScript. However, if you rely on the server controlling the button's enabled / disabled state, then you basically have no way of blocking the user submitting the form multiple times anyway. For this reason you should have some kind of logic to detect multiple submissions from the same user in a short time period (identical values from the same Session, for example).