Watch out for this CFFORM issue

February 10, 2008 coldfusion

(This post is more than 2 years old.)

I'm working on converting a site to Model-Glue. During the conversion I was copying over a page that had two forms on it. One made use of CFFORM, the other was really just a button to let you link to another page.

For some reason - whenever I hit the button on the second form, the validation for the CFFORM would fire. That didn't make sense. The validation should only apply to the first form.

Here is a subset of the code. See if you can spot something odd before I reveal what the problem was:


<cfform name="Volunteer" action="http://www.cnn.com" method="post">
<table cellspacing="0" > 
<tr class="odd">
	<td><cfinput name="FirstName" type="text" size="10" tabindex="1"
			maxlength="24"
			required="yes"
			message="Please enter a valid First Name."
			validate="regular_expression" 
			pattern="^[a-z A-Z-]+$"></td>
	<td><input name="Action" type="submit" value="Add" tabindex="4"></td>
</tr>
</cfform>
<cfoutput>
</table>

<form name="Finished" action="http://www.yahoo.com" method="post"> <div class="submit"> <input name="Action" type="submit" value="Yahoo"> </div> </form> </cfoutput>

See it yet? Notice the placement of the closing HTML table tab versus the closing CFFORM tag. When rendered out, this resulted in something like so:


<form ...>
<table>
</form>
</table>

Now while I can't imagine why that would mess with validation, when I fixed the order of the tags the validation worked correctly. Form one did it's thing, and form two simply let me load up a new URL.