Dojomino

1 -

2 - Posting fixed.

Thanks for submitting this David. You and I have a lot to catch up on here.

3 - Another way

You can also prevent the 'nameless' INPUTs from being sent by using dojo.query():


dojo.query( "INPUT", frm ).filter(
function(inputnode) {
return (inputnode.name == '');
}
).orphan();



This removes all INPUT nodes with no name. Then submit the form normally using dojo.xhrPost().

4 - I've only tried it against Domino, so can't speak for other app servers. Though I don't think it would hurt to change the rule. I can't think of a case where you'd want unnamed fields, but just because I can't think of one doesn't mean there isn't a valid reason for it. An alternate solution may be to make it a parameter of the post that lets you decide if you'd like it to exclude those or not.

5 - @6:

The Dojo XHRPost (version 1.0 at least) accepts also form nodes. I am using this in my application:

var kw = { url: frm.action,
load: function (data) {
targetPane.setContent(data);
},
error: function(data) {
console.log('error: '+data);
targetPane.setContent(data);
},
timeout: 3500,
form: frm
};

dojo.xhrPost(kw);


The 'frm' that above code is referencing gets created as pass-thru HTML with Computed Text on a Domino form:

var frm = document.forms['<Computed Text>']

and value for the text is:

"_" + Form

6 - Ah, my apologies. Yes, that makes sense! That sounds like an elegant solution indeed. Sorry I misunderstood you the first time. Sounds like David got it right away He always was the smarter one in the family.

Thanks for sharing.

7 -

8 - If I'm reading this correctly, it won't work because the dojo.query is only going to return a set of filtered nodes.

xhrPost will take the form name as its argument and then post all the fields it finds in that form, thus ignoring the query result just performed.

If, on the other hand, you are saying use dojo.query to get the nodes, perform your own node destruction, and then do xhrPost, yes, I assume that would work.

However, the problem should be fixed in the dojo source regardless. There's no value in submitting name/value pairs in a post to the backend if you don't have a name

9 - So, just to clarify, is this Domino-specific? Or do you feel we should we change the match rule generally?

10 - Domino may have more rigorous (read as less flexible perhaps) handling of the post data that causes it to error out. So perhaps other web servers are able to better handle this condition.

But I agree with David in that I can't really see a use-case where a submission of data without a name pair provides any value. For example, what would you do with this data stream resulting from a post:

firstName=Lance&lastName=Spellman&=888-111-1111&=Phoenix&State=AZ

You and I know by looking at it that the 888-111-1111 is a phone number, but the web server won't. And even if it could distinguish that, is it the office, home, or cell number? So the data has no value, and the potential for causing error on the server.

Also, since the data that will be submitted this way is NOT the core form data anyway, but simply the dojo mechanics for building widgets on the screen, it's unnecessary data.

For all those reasons, I would make the filter universal in the Dojo source. We'd submitted a bug in Tracker with the fix, but I can't locate it now.

11 - Hmm... it seems I was not clear enough. I understood that you said that:


"it won't work because the dojo.query is only going to return a set of filtered nodes. xhrPost will take the form name as its argument"


My point was that xhrPost also accepts the form itself as parameter. Thus in my example above, when i write:

var kw = {

(...other stuff...)

form: frm
};

this frm is the DOM node that was modified with dojo.query and thus has the 'nameless' values removed.

So, I do not pass the form name to xhrPost. I pass the modified form itself. I included the rest of the code so that you could see where the frm was coming from.

Hope I was more clear this time.

This code actually works in my application (I am using dojo 1.0.0 from AOL CDN). I understand that change to source is not big, however I would not like to maintain a locally patched version.

Generally I agree with you that nameless values should not be sent to server. Maybe this will be fixed in 1.0.2.

12 - I understand, but that's a different issue. That's dealing with the idea of Domino's handling/mangling of form names as it spits out the HTML to the browser.

The issue we're dealing with here is that once the form is rendered, along with all the little dojo widget bits and insertions, the input fields that are now inside that form don't all have 'name' attributes. When you use xhrPost, you are giving it the form element and it will scrape all the input tags inside that form to submit to the server.

Where it breaks is when those input fields don't have a name (what dojo does with some of it's helper input fields).

We don't really need to make a big deal of this, I'm sure it will be fixed in a maintenance release, and if you're in a hurry, it's 5 characters on one line of code in the dojo source to fix it.

13 - Excellent, thanks for passing that info along. I like you solution and will give it a try. Obviously if I can make that work without needing to modify source, that is the optimal situation.