Standardize form submission behavior when "enter" key is pressed

My current installation of D7 doesn't let me use the enter key anymore in textarea fields to create multi-line entries. It did work yesterday (see screencast http://drupal.org/node/467296#comment-2095248 ).

This might be a feature to prevent un-intentional submission of a form but it steals the enter key for any other purpose like scripting for accessibility (see #467296: Accessibility improvements for vertical tabs ) which I would deem a bug.

Frank

Testing Drupal 7 with latest .dev release (9th October) ... enter key does not work in the body field, the summary field ... and AFAIK ... all other textareas.

My suspect would be the following snippet from /misc/ajax.js (line 165 ff). AFAICS it's the only relevant reference to the enter key (keycode = 13) I found in core files:

// If necessary, enable keyboard submission so that AJAX behaviors
// can be triggered through keyboard input as well as e.g. a mousedown
// action.
if (element_settings.keypress) {
  $(element_settings.element).keypress(function (event) {
    // Detect enter key.
    if (event.keyCode == 13) {
      $(element_settings.element).trigger(element_settings.event);
      return false;
   }
  });
}

EDIT:
Seems to be the culprit. Deactivating this function temporarily by changing it to keyCode == 913 reinstates the usual behavior.

hth
Frank

Changed issue title to reflect the current problem at hand and priority to "critical".

Seems to be fixed. I'd be curious what caused the problem. There have been some recent changes to includes/ajax.inc but I can't figure out what's going on there exactly.

This is still a valid issue. I would vote to disable the enter key in all textfields.

@Damien

I am skeptical whether this is a good idea.

AFAIK disabling the enter key in all textfields can have one of two purposes:

1) Prevent accidental submission of a form.
Using the enter key for form submission is also an accessibility/usability issue because forms should be usable without using a mouse.

2) Preventing line breaks
This should be handled by a filter not by disabling the enter key.

Cheers,
Frank

@Frank

I created #631334: Enter key disabled by ajax.js, making it impossible to use textareas properly which focuses on the bug you described. I think this issue (standardize submission behavior) is valid though and I support Damien's idea. I suspect he meant textfields as in #type=textfield, because hitting enter inside a textarea has no effect on form submission.

@carlos8f

Thanks for your input. Perhaps we should mark one of the treads as a duplicate?

Just a short general hint: The recommended method for disabling the submit behavior of the enter key is using the DOM method event.preventDefault which jQuery does a good job of making this working across browsers.

Cheers,
Frank

No reason to mark a duplicate. I created the new issue for ajax.js to prevent issue hijacking, because I think David Rothstein brought up something that should be addressed at some point. The ajax.js issue is a pretty bad usability flub though, because how are we supposed to write articles when we're stuck with one big paragraph :)

You're right. Perhaps I should move my stuff over to your thread ;-)

Bumping to D8. Not sure if there is still an issue here, but if there is it doesn't need to be dealt with in D7.

Given we have no automated js testing, I think this may be too disruptive for 8.0.x, tentatively bumping to 8.1.x.

JFTR, we had an extensive discussion about the use of the Enter key while working on #467296: Accessibility improvements for vertical tabs for Drupal 7. Please read our rationale in the following comments and take that into account when considering changes to the Enter key behavior in forms:

• https://www.drupal.org/node/467296#comment-2712420
• https://www.drupal.org/node/467296#comment-2724680

Kind regards,
Frank