I am trying to make my job easier by creating simple AHK scrips to auto-fill certain forms online.
Im not really good at explaining, but hopefully someone will understand what Im saying. The problem is that this website has certain textboxes with dropdown auto-suggestions turned on, and it has a delay when selecting those textboxes. I assume when selecting textbox it is pulling data from some database which is causing delay. Now my question is. Is it possible to turn off dropdown menu on websites or even in entire browser if necessary? I really want to my script to tab-in, wright down whats needed, tab-out without delay.
Autocomplete dropdown lists are just JS scripts. So there is no way, I think, to disable them by clicking checkbox in browser settings.
First, try to disable JS completely.
Also, if only few sites are involved, you could try to find out what JS libraries are used and disable them in browser JS console.
Are you planning to do this via keypresses or via COM?
I imagine that via keypresses you could not avoid focusing the elements and triggering the information lookup.
AutoHotkey can interact with webpages on Internet Explorer using COM (Component Object Model).
COM can launch/latch onto an IE instance, detect if the page is loading/has loaded, navigate to a particular url, and set the text of web elements,
quite possibly without triggering the drop-down lists. I haven't tested if COM can disable elements, it's possible.
Also, Acc.ahk may be able to set the text of elements.
There are a bunch of question on this but no answers on how to do it without javascript.
If you have one form that has 2 select boxes. The second select box has different options based on what you choose for the first select box. Here is a js example. Not all users have js enabled so for these users this option would be unavailable.
Can this be achieved solely using CSS3, HTML5 and Ruby? I would show what I've got so far in trying this but I got nothing.
What you are asking is how to manipulate the DOM after it has loaded without a client-side scripting language. This is not possible as far as I am aware; unfortunately that is not what you want to hear.
The proper solution in this case would be to have the user submit the page and generate the second selection box at that time. You will have to rely entirely on server-side logic to handle the problem. So basically something like:
Serve a page with just a single selection box
When the page is posted generate a similar page where the first selection is locked and display a second selection box with the possible options.
Continue the iteration until you have all of the required selections filled out by the user.
Serve the result that the user requested.
I have a project where I am converting some old HTTPUnit code to HTMLUnit. Among one of the issues I have ran into is the form.submit() option of HTTPUnit.The form.submit works without having to specifically finding the submit button for that particular form provided I have selected the correct form while initializing the form variable earlier.
Is there something similar in HTMLUnit that I could use?
Just to explain the significance of what I am asking, I am testing a shopping site with several forms (for different product) and each form has it own form button with no specific attribute to separate them. Every form has its own different structure and hence finding the submit button using xpath is a bit difficult.
Specifically what I am asking is there a way in HTMLUnit where I could submit a form on basis of the form itself and not the specific submit button? And if not given the above circumstances could anybody please suggest a workaround?
Thanks in advance.
I have a pretty extensive form on one of my rails sites and I was wondering if its possible to dynamically save the form for every onchange input. What I'm trying to prevent is users taking the time to fill the form out and then lose all their changes because of a connectivity issue or something stupid like that...
Any suggestions? Basically, I don't want the form to have to be submitted at all. I just want the form to save like a preference would in an Mac OS X (no apply or save button it just saves).
using rails 3...thanks!
The strain that would put on your server and DB would be several orders of magnitude higher than a more traditional approach. I also agree with Kyle that I would be very confused about the lack of submit button. At the very least, you'll need to notify users each time data is sent to the server and saved successfully, otherwise they'll have no idea why you aren't asking them to save.
Also, think about all the overhead. With every keystroke the user will have to initiate a connection, send their HTTP headers, cookies, the contents of the form, etc.
Have you considered an autosave feature instead? Maybe save the form every 2 minutes if changes have been made, and then put a submit button on the form as well? I think it would save you a great deal of pain, but get you almost the same benefit.
You could attach an ajax event to each input losing focus that would call the Controllers update method.
Most users would be surprised by this behavior though because it isn't the expected behavior of a web site.
If you use AJAX to call update, then here are a few things that might help: jQuery's serialize() function can help gather the form data into a post request without having to call the forms submit action. Using save(:validate => false) will bypass validation if you are saving drafts and want to skip validation until the final save.
I have made a little app for signing up for an event. User input their data and click "sign me in".
Now sometimes people are double in the database, the exact same data that got inserted 2 times very quickly after each other. This can only mean someone clicked the button twice, which caused two posts to happen.
This is common web problem, as credit card apps and forum apps often say: "Clicking once is enough!".
I guess you could solve it by checking for the exact same data to see if the post is unique, but I wonder if there are other methods.
This ofcourse does not count for ASP.NET webforms, because POST doesn't matter as much.
While JavaScript solutions can disable the submit button after it has been clicked, this will have no effect on those people who have JavaScript disabled. You should always make things work correctly without JavaScript before adding it in, otherwise there's no point as users will still be able to bypass the checks by just disabling JavaScript.
If the page where the form appears is dynamically generated, you can add a hidden field which contains some sort of sequence number, a hash, or anything unique. Then you have some server-side validation that will check if a request with that unique value has already come in. When the user submits the form, the unique value is checked against a list of "used" values. If it exists in the list, it's a dupe request and can be discarded. If it doesn't exist, then add it to the list and process as normal. As long as you make sure the value is unique, this guarantees the same form cannot be submitted twice.
Of course, if the page the form is on is not dynamically generated, then you'll need to do it the hard way on the server-side to check that the same information has not already been submitted.
Most of the answers so far have been client-side. On the server-side, you can generate a hidden field with a GUID when you first produce the form, and then record that GUID as a submitted form when the post is received. Check it before doing any more processing.
Whenever a page is requested from the server , generate a unique requestToken , save it in server side,mark status as NOT Processed and pass it along with the current requested page. Now whenever a page submit happens , get the requestToken from the "POST"ed data and check the status and save the data or take alternate action.
Most of the banking applications use this technique to prevent double "POST"ing.So this is a time proven & reliable way of preventing double submissions.
A user-side solution is to disable the submission button via Javascript after the first click.
It has drawbacks, but I see it often used on e-commerce websites.
But, it won't never replace a real server-side validation.
Client side techniques are useful, but you may want to couple it with some server side techniques.
One way to do this is to include a unique token in the form (e.g. a GUID or similar), so that when you come to process the form you can check to see whether the token has already been used, preventing a double submission.
In your case, if you have a table with event visitors, you might include this token as a column.
A client-only solution won't be enough, as stated in many of the answers here. You need to go with a server-side fail-safe.
An often overlooked reason that disabling the submit button doesn't work is, the user can simply refresh the submit target (and click OK on the "are you sure you want to resubmit the POST data?" dialog). Or even, some browsers may implicitly reload the submitted page when you try to save the page to disk (for example, you're trying to save a hard-copy of an order confirmation).
Almost no one has js disabled.
Think about coding your e-commerce website for the 70 year old woman who double clicks every link and button.
All you want to do is add a javascript to prevent her clicking "Order Now" twice.
Yes - check this at the server side too "be defensive" - but don't code for that case. But for the sake of a better UI do it on the client side too.
Here are some scripts that I found:
//
// prevent double-click on submit
//
jQuery('input[type=submit]').click(function(){
if(jQuery.data(this, 'clicked')){
return false;
}
else{
jQuery.data(this, 'clicked', true);
return true;
}
});
and
// Find ALL <form> tags on your page
$('form').submit(function(){
// On submit disable its submit button
$('input[type=submit]', this).attr('disabled', 'disabled');
});
None of the solutions address a load-balance server.
If you have some load balancer, send a UUID (or any type of unique number) to the server to store and read again will not work well if the server is not aware of other servers, because each request could be processed by a different server in a stateless environment. These servers need to read/write to the same place.
If you have multiple servers you will need to have some shared cache (like a Redis) among the servers to read/write the unique value in the same place (what could be an over-engineering solution, but works).
Client side alteration is a common technique:
Disable submit button
Change the screen to a "please wait" screen
If the form was modal, changing the screen back to their usual process (this has the benefit of making things look really slick)
But it's not perfect. It all relies on JS being available and if that's not the case, without back-end duplication detection, you'll get duplicates still.
So my advice is to develop some sort of detection behind the scenes and then improve your form to stop people with JS being able to double-submit.
You can track the number of times the form's been submitted and compare it to the number of unique visits to the page with the form on it in the session.
Beside the many good techniques already mentioned, another simple server-side method, that has the drawback of requiring a session, is to have a session variable that is switched off on the first submit.