[jifty-devel] Problem with disabling buttons after submit in forms

[Edward Funnekotter]

Hi all,

Now that I added support for 'onchange' within form fields, I am now running
into a small problem with submit buttons automatically being disabled when
one of these other triggers causes a submit.  If you are refreshing the
entire form after the submit it isn't a problem, but if you just want to
change a portion of the form that is in its own region then the disabled
button does not become re-enabled.  Here is simple example:

*FORM START*

  *Action1Field1*
  *Action1Field2*

  *RegionA START*

      *Action2Field1*
      *Aciton2Field2 - onchange => {submit => Action2, refresh_self => 1*

  *RegionA END*

  *SubmitButton - onclick => {submit => undef} *

*FORM END*


The idea is that RegionA can be changed based on Action2Field2's settings
without submitting and reloading the entire form.  In my case, the form is
fairly large and it is a lot smoother if I can just refresh a small part of
it.  The problem is that since I am just refreshing RegionA, the
SubmitButton is never redrawn.  The act of submitting Action2 caused the
button to be disabled due to the way jifty.js performs updates.

I have gone through the javascript code and understand what it is doing, but
I would like advice on the best way to fix this - or perhaps there is a much
better way to do the type of thing I am doing.  I did experiment with just
calling the 'a.enable_input_fields()' in a similar manner to if a submission
fails and while this works for me, I doubt that it will work in general
depending on how the DOM changed during the update.

Here are a few options that spring to mind for the fix:

   1. Do not automatically disable all buttons in the form that have this
   action.  Only disable the actual element that triggered the submit.  I have
   a feeling that this might defeat the reason of the disable (so you couldn't
   resubmit while an update is outstanding).
   2. Keep a list of all disabled elements that fall outside of the
   fragment being replaced.  Re-enable these on successful completion of the
   update.
   3. Keep a list of all disabled elements regardless of where they are
   and re-enable those even if they have been replaced.  If they aren't in the
   DOM, I don't think it would matter...

While I describe a specific case that is bothering me, I suspect that this
problem will always happen if a submission does not replace the form that it
is part of.

Like I said, I am happy to fix this, but would like some feedback before I
embark on any changes.

Ed
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.bestpractical.com/pipermail/jifty-devel/attachments/20070817/92d5107b/attachment.htm