A problem with jQuery’s .serialize() and the answer

Curtis M. Humphrey — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 01:33:16 +0000

I was having a problem with the jQuery .serialize() function and the good news is that I found the answer to this problem.

The Problem
The jQuery .serialize() function was returning “” or nothing. Not what I wanted to say the least. Here was the setup. I was using .serialize() like this:

...
$(this).parents('.ARow').serialize()
...

and the xhtml was:

<form class="ARow">
<input class="food_state" size="10" type="text" />
<input id="NewFoodState" type="button" value="Add New Food State" />
</form>

The Answer
The problem was that .serialize() outputted “”. The answer was that if an input does not have a “name” field then .serialize() skips it. Of course that makes sense but sometime simple reasons can be overlooked. Therefore when the xhtml is updated to:

<form class="ARow">
<input class="food_state" name="food_state" size="10" type="text" />
<input id="NewFoodState" type="button" value="Add New Food State" />
</form>

The output of .serialize() becomes, as desired, “food_state: raw”. I hope this helps someone else.

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Grabbing a subsection of input field values

Curtis M. Humphrey — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:43:49 +0000

I was looking for a jQuery way of grabbing the values of a subsection of input fields. I know it is more complicated then just getting the $().val() of items because of selection elements. I found the plugin called Values but it was a bit more than I needed. I only need to get values not to set them. Plus I don’t want to get values from elements other than inputs, so there is no need to have the function grab text when it cannot find values. So for now I will use this plugin but I want to modify it in the future to serve this narrow purpose. (I like small clean simple code and not bloat).

–some time later–
Lol. It appears that sometimes the solution is right there and I over think the problem. I can do what I wanted to do with this simple line:

$('container class').find('input, select').serialize()

Well problem solved, on to the next one .