How To Enable the SOM on an ASP Page That Has a <Form> Tag (232218)

MORE INFORMATION

Sample Scenario:

If you have an ASP with the following FORM:

<FORM id=form1 name=form1 action="action.asp">
<BODY LANGUAGE=javascript onload="return window_onload()">
<INPUT type="text" id=text1 name=text1> 
<INPUT type="submit" value="Submit" id=submit1 name=submit1>
</BODY>
</FORM>

in the window_onload client event handler, (use the Script Outline of Visual InterDev's Interactive Development Environment (IDE) to go to the window_onload script block), you have the following code to initialize the textbox named text1:

function window_onload() { 
 Form1.text1.value =('test'); 
}

Undesired Behavior

When you enable SOM (either manually or after dragging and dropping any DTCs to the ASP), and then view the ASP in a Web browser after enabling the SOM, the following errors or behaviors can occur:

An error message indicating:
Form1 is undefined
When using the SUBMIT button to submit the ASP, the ASP is not being submitted to the action handler, in this case, "action.asp:"
When using the SUBMIT button to submit the ASP, the ASP is not being submitted to the action handler, in this case, "action.asp:"

This occurs because when you enable the SOM, an additional FORM tag is added to the ASP as shown below:

<FORM name=thisForm METHOD=post>

This generally results in errors in two areas:

errors when referencing HTML intrinsic controls and ActiveX controls and,
errors when submitting the ASP.

Workaround

To work around this problem, follow the steps below:

Remove the original FORM tag, in this case, the following two lines:

<FORM id=form1 name=form1 action="action.asp">
... 
</FORM>

To ensure the controls (ActiveX, HTML intrinsic, and DTCs) on the ASP are referenced properly, change the window_onload event handler to the following, specifying 'thisForm' instead of the FORM name:
```
function window_onload() { 
 thisForm.text1.value =('test'); 
} 
					
```

The following line is added to the ASP by enabling the SOM:

 <FORM name=thisForm METHOD=post>

Because the above line is not editable from within Visual InterDev, you need to specify the FORM action handler in a separate function. In this case, you can modify the original ASP to manually submit the page as shown below:

<FORM name=thisForm METHOD=post>
<BODY LANGUAGE=javascript onload="return window_onload()">
<INPUT type="text" id=text1 name=text1>
<INPUT type="submit" value="Submit" id=submit1 name=submit1 onclick="manualsubmit()">
</BODY>
</FORM>

The function "manualsubmit" is added to submit the form to the correct ASP, in this case, "action.asp:"

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JAVAScript">
function manualsubmit()
{ 
   thisForm.action='action.asp'; 
}
</SCRIPT>