I found a very helpful way to submit forms that have the submit button disabled. All you have to do is fire up Firefox’s DOM inspector, click on the form button, and remove the ‘disabled’ attribute in the DOM node menu.
Then the button becomes active, and you can submit. This is great for intentionally causing errors by bypassing any logic that prevents users from submitting forms prematurely. I’m not sure how often most people would use this, but it’s very helpful.
September 13th, 2005 at 4:39 am
No competent software engineer would even entrust data validation to the UI, much less that which is hosted by an inherently untrustworthy browser! This could be fun.
September 13th, 2005 at 5:01 am
Yes, but usability is important. We disable buttons to give a visual clue not to submit the form.
I also use the Struts token to prevent double submissions, and this is truly a belt and suspenders kind of thing… Also, it’s on an internal app, so we really don’t have to worry about malicious users.
IE users (god help them) are a different story.
September 15th, 2005 at 6:03 am
>Yes, but usability is important.
Agree. I was being a bit sarcastic given the codebase I work on. What I’m bothered by is an app that trusts the browser to enforce client side rules. A couple of years ago, I was able, via some use of the back button, to submit a 401K withdrawal percentage above what was allowed by the plan. Apparently, the javascript that was supposed to enforce a business rule failed and the backend dutifully persisted the data as requested.
September 15th, 2005 at 6:09 am
uh….