Posts Tagged Html

Check if field is displayed with JavaScript

When you have dynamic content on your webpage, it is sometimes useful to check if an HTML element is displayed on the screen.
For example, it could be handy to move the focus on a specific field after validation. But what if this field is actually hidden? Does your browser like to move the focus on an hidden field? Well, I can tell you that IE doesn’t like it very much! 😉

There are a lot of solutions on the web to check if a field is displayed or not. However, the solution I propose is probably the simplest:

function isDisplay(obj) {
    return obj.offsetTop > 0;
}

Note that this code has been tested on Google Chrome 18.0, Firefox 3.6, Safari 5.1.5 and IE 7.

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Prevent double-click on HTML form

How many users are still double-clicking when they visit a website? It is not really a problem with links, but it could be with buttons.
Let’s take, for example, a ‘contact us’ form and a submit button which will send the content of the form by email to the website administrator. What happens if a user double-click on the submit button? The form will be submitted twice and in consequence two emails will be sent instead of one.

There are multiple ways to fix this problem. The solution I will explain below is to disable the submit button once it has been pressed. In that way, even if the user double-clicks on it, the form will be submitted only once! 🙂

To disable the submit button once it has been pressed, you simply need to add the following JavaScript code in the onclick attribute of your button tag:

this.disabled=true;this.form.submit();

For example:

<input name="submitButton" id="submitButton" type="submit" value="Submit" onclick="this.disabled=true;this.form.submit();" />

The code above will work fine if you don’t have an onsubmit attribute in your form tag. But, if you have one, you will notice that the function this.form.submit() will not execute the content of the onsubmit attribute. In that case, you need to force the call as shown below:

this.disabled=true;if(this.form.onsubmit()){this.form.submit();}else{this.disabled=false;}

However, it is recommended to move whatever you have in the onsubmit attribute in the button onclick, such as:

this.disabled=true;if(validateForm()){this.form.submit();}else{this.disabled=false;}

NOTE:
If in your code, you are using the following to check if the form has been submitted:

if (isset($_POST['submitButton'])) { echo "Form submitted!"; }

It will need to be replaced by the following:

if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] == "POST") { echo "Form submitted!"; }

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Detect if JavaScript is enabled

Because of the emergence of Ajax, people don’t disable JavaScript much nowadays.
I don’t know the percentage of people having disabled JavaScript. It is likely under 5%. But if you have a website visited by millions of visitors every month, even 1% is matter!

This is why I wrote the following code:

<noscript>JavaScript is DISABLED.</noscript>
<span id="displayIfJavaScript" style="display:none">JavaScript is ENABLED.</span>

<script>
document.getElementById('displayIfJavaScript').style.display = "block";
</script>

The text under the noscript tag will be displayed if JavaScript is disabled or not supported. The text under the span tag is not displayed by default and will be showed using JavaScript, this is why we can be sure JavaScript is enabled in that case.
You can obviously change the content of the noscript and span tags. You could, for example, hide a form which uses JavaScript validation to non-JavaScript users by putting the HTML code of the form under the span tag.

Please see below the above script in action:

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Validate file size prior upload

If I ask you what is the most complex thing in HTML, what would you reply?
For me, it would be the file upload (or maybe character encoding, but this is not the topic! 😛 ).

One of the problem around the file upload functionality is that there is, no matter what, a file size limit set on the server. The limit could be 100Kb such as 100Mb depending on the configuration of the server.
But what happens if the user tries to upload a file bigger than the limit?
It’s simple, the file is going to be uploaded on the server until the limit is reached. Once it happens, the server returns an error message to the client.
Well, this is not ideal!
Indeed, depending on the connection speed of the user, the error message could be displayed a few minutes later. And you know how impatient users are! 😉

So obviously, the solution would be to validate the file size before the upload starts.
To do that, we can simply use the fileSize Javascript function against the upload field.
But, surprising enough, this function doesn’t work on Internet Explorer! 👿

And the only solution I found to get the file size with IE was using ActiveX:

var oas = new ActiveXObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject");
var e = oas.getFile(document.forms[0].file.value);
var size = e.size;

Finally, here is the whole Javascript function to validate the file size:

function validateFileSize(file, maxSize) {
	if (navigator.appName=="Microsoft Internet Explorer") {
		if (file.value) {
			var oas = new ActiveXObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject");
			var e = oas.getFile(file.value);
			var size = e.size;
		}
	} else {
		if (file.files[0]!=undefined) {
			var size = file.files[0].fileSize;
		}
	}
	if (size!=undefined && size > maxSize)
		return false;
	return true;
}

with file the file input field to validate and maxSize the maximum size in bits.

For example, you can call this function as follow:

validateImageSize(document.forms[0].file, 500000)

I successfully tested this code on:

  • Google Chrome 6;
  • Firefox 3.6;
  • Internet Explorer 6;
  • Internet Explorer 7.

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The message tags of MyFaces and RichFaces

Working on an application using MyFaces and RichFaces, I had no choice but understand what is the difference between the message tag provided by Myfaces (h:message) and the message tag overridden by RichFaces (rich:message).

These tags allow to display information about the first FacesMessage that is assigned to the component referenced by the “for” attribute. The difference is that the RichFaces tag has some extra functionalities such as Ajax rendering, error markers and predefined css class names.
Have a look at the following page for more details: http://livedemo.exadel.com/richfaces-demo/richfaces/message.jsf

This is all nice and well but it is not the only difference. Indeed, the HTML code generated by both these frameworks will also be different!

First of all, let’s see how the tag <h:message styleClass="errormsg" for="element"/> will be transformed. If there is no message to display, nothing will be generated (which is a good behaviour). However, if a message is present, the tag will be replaced by the following HTML code:

<span class="errormsg">Required.</span>

So far, so good!

But now let’s check what code RichFaces is generating for the tag <rich:message styleClass="errormsg" for="element"/>.
The following is the code created if there is NO message to render:

<span class="rich-message errormsg" id="form:j_id255">
    <span class="rich-message-label"></span>
</span>

And here is the code which will replace the RichFaces tag if there is a message to display:

<span class="rich-message errormsg" id="form:j_id255">
    <span class="rich-message-label">Required.</span>
</span>

As you can see, the main difference is that RichFaces is wrapping the original span tag into another span tag. But, it is also generating some code even if there is no message to display! You would ask why is it doing that? The response is simple. The wrapper span element is necessary for RichFaces to Ajax-render the message tag if an error message has to be displayed for the targeting element.

So make sure you don’t put any padding or margin style in your custom CSS class which I called ‘errormsg’ in my example. Otherwise, you might have a gap when you were expecting nothing… (this happened to me) 😉

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