JavaScript Form Posting and Firefox

While working on a .NET form today, I needed to add postback functionality to a Gridview control, using standard HTML radio buttons instead of traditional buttons (I had to confirm that a value was selected and if so, highlight the row).

So I assembled a prototype that implemented two hidden input fields. One held the radio group ID, and the other held the RowIndex value for the Gridviewrow; I needed these two pieces of information in order to flag the button as ‘checked’ as well as color the correct row.

So I whipped up a simple script:

function setPBItem(formItem, rowVal)
{
form1.hdnPBItem.value = formItem;
form1.hdnPBRowValue.value = rowVal;
form1.submit();
}


Works fine in IE 7, as well as Google Chrome… but it did not work at all in Firefox.

A little digging around led me to a few posts where others complained about the same problem in Firefox – although this is sound DOM syntax, none of it worked in Firefox.

However, changing it to this got it working:

function setPBItem(formItem, rowVal)
{
document.forms["form1"].hdnPBItem.value = formItem;
document.forms["form1"].hdnPBRowValue.value = rowVal;
document.forms["form1"].submit();
}

The difference here is simply adding the fully qualified DOM syntax. But apparently you also have to specify the form’s name; the index did not work in Firefox either.

Form submits just fine now. Something to keep in mind when implementing similar functionality.