How to send the user back to a field on a long form

[Mike London]

In our application, we have a couple hundred HTML pages with many controls on each one.

The request has come in to be able to be able to return the focus back to the last field the user was editing after, say, he clicks "save and continue".

Because there are so many fields on our HTML forms, the users cannot seem to remember which field they were editing.

Is there a simple way to do this return to the last edited field, or would something like the below work better:

// save the field name we just lost focus from...
var allElments = document.getElementById('*');
for (var i = 0; allElements.length; i++)
{
// loop through and assign to a function to remember the field name when focus leaves the field.
addEventHandler(document.getElementById(allElements[i]), "blur", saveFieldName); // need to create saveFieldName function
}

// add other code to restore the focus...

====

Look forward to any replies.

-- Mike

[Bear Bibeault]

Why all the looping? Just establish one blur handler on the form.

[Mike London]

Bear Bibeault wrote:Why all the looping? Just establish one blur handler on the form.

The looping was to assign each field on the form to the one blur event handler.

Correct?

Thanks.

[Bear Bibeault]

Bear Bibeault wrote:Just establish one blur handler on the form.

Why does there need to be a handler on each control when just one will do?

[Mike London]

But wouldn't you need to assign the onBlur() event to some function for every control on the form?

Would you do that assignment in a loop?

Perhaps I'm missing your point.

Thanks Bear!

[Bear Bibeault]

Mike London wrote:But wouldn't you need to assign the onBlur() event to some function for every control on the form?

No. Why? A single event handelr on the form can handle the blur event of all its children.

Perhaps I'm missing your point.

I think you are.

I forget if you are one of the posters who has my jQuery book. If so, read the first section of chapter 4 which describes how events work in the browsers without jQuery.

If not, look up "event bubbling". It's needless to put the same event handler on multiple form controls when you can just do it once.