jquery: how to remove blank fields from a form before submitting?

Question

I have a page with a set of forms on it, used for API testing. For reasons not worth explicating, I generally don't want to include empty fields in the submission to the server. How do I delete empty fields from the data before submitting?

For example, if I have a form with two fields, foo and bar, and the user leaves bar blank, I want the server to see the submission as if the only field were foo.

My first stab at that involved looping through the fields using jquery with

$("form").submit(function() {
    $(this).children(':input').each(...)
}

And removing the field. But that a) didn't work, and b) seems like it would delete the field from the visible form on the page which is not what I want.

Another approach might be to loop through the fields and construct the submit string manually with fields that have values other than "". Will that work? Any better ideas?

Answer 1

One way would be to set the "disabled" attribute on those fields, which prevents their values from being serialized and sent to the server:

$(function()
{
    $("form").submit(function()
    {
        $(this).children(':input[value=""]').attr("disabled", "disabled");

        return true; // ensure form still submits
    });
});

If you have client-side validation, you'll also want to re-enable these fields in the event of a validation failure:

$(':input').removeAttr("disabled");

EDIT: repaired bug