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

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.

This page is using: [download id="1"]

Related posts:

1. Grabbing a subsection of input field values
2. Comparing File Download Managers