jQuery Forum

It really depends.  If you use something to potentially retain the values in the form, like session, perhaps you should unset them on page load, setting them to "".  What gets sent I think depends on whether you have your form fields hidden or completely removed.  If your form has no other fields and you construct them on the fly based on the click event then only the radio buttons will get sent.  If you have them hidden, they'll be passed along with empty values.

Thanks for your reply Luka!

And what if I want to create a select field that displays some options, plus option "other", so that if the user selects "other", the select must be replaced by a text field to allow the user to enter a custom value?

Let's assume that both elements are named equally (name="mychoice") because they eventually will represent the same value in the database, and the second one is hidden at the start, but if the user selects "other", the select field is assigned .hide() and the text field is assigned .show()

What would happen? Would I actually need to detach one of them from the DOM instead of simply hiding? Or... Maybe there's a better way to simulate a select which also permits the user to enter text if no option is applicable.

Would you please Luka or whoever who reads us point me to the right way?

Luis

Generally, the only form elements submitted are "successful controls". Here's how that is defined:

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/forms.html#h-17.13.2

Notice that disabled elements are not sent. Data from elements that happen to be invisible on the page (because they are hidden, or inside some other element that is hidden) can still be submitted.

This is true of forms submitted without any script at all, forms submitted by the jQuery .submit() method, and for compatibility reasons it's also true of jQuery's .serialize() method. That means it's also true of plugins that use .serialize() like the Forms plugin.

Hello Dave, I appreciate your help. So, after reading that link, I guess that using methods like .hide() will not prevent the hidden elements to be sent. I will add the "disabled" attribute to all corresponding form elements instead.

Regards!