[jQuery] get POST information

I have a form in a toggled div and I am trying to figure out how to get jQuery to read a POST var to know if the form is active or not so that I can have the div open for errors and thank you messages.

I have been able to do this with a javascript call that will be executed if a snippet identifies the POST var. This works fine but I think that I should be able to do this directly in jQuery rather than relying on php. Am I making it more complicated than needed?

You could do it in jQuery, but I actually think that it’s better to validate the POST var in PHP and then execute the snippet as you’re doing now (server-side validation is always better than client-side imho).

I agree with the server side validation. This is for after the server side validation in order to have the hidden div visible to show the errors (otherwise the div closes on page reload). I basically just need to know if the form is active or not to display the div acordingly

I use basic jQuery validation before the server side validation also (if we can do as much as possible before sending to the server the better).

I think you’d either need to use jQuery’s Ajax functions (which have callbacks) or set some DOM element that jQuery can access the value of in order to do it using jQuery. But if you’re gonna do that, you may as well set the visibility of the div at that point instead of passing the command to jQuery to execute. I use snippets like this to pop up modals with info after a submit in some cases, and I just use a snippet to insert the code when necessary.

and I just use a snippet to insert the code when necessary.

Yep, that is what I have been doing it. I was thinking about running the form as an ajax call but I don’t have enough time to figure it out for now (believe it or not I have been seriously dragging my feet with playing around with ajax).

Not everything needs to be Ajax. Some things are better kept simple. If you can make a contact form send message, validate input, and weed out spambots you’ve accomplished the mission as far as I’m concerned.

I had seen the form plugin for jquery but did not get it together to work with eForm. I guess I could not use eForm but I wanted to make it easy for the client to edit the forms in the future. I will take another look at it and see if it makes more sense today. Thanks for the input.

This jquery plugin lets you parse the url and get elements. I think that with this you could build an else/if statement in jquery based on the url parameters. It wont work with post though.

At this point I am just thinking out loud. The issue I had was resolved with a snippet. But the objective is to have the form + error message be visible when the page reloads by changing the default state of the form from being hidden to being visible (as well as some other hiding and showing).

If the form is using GET jquery would be able to know if the form was active by reading the url string. But since my forms are in POST this will not work, but may be interesting for something else.