A great way to improve the user experience of your website is to validate and submit forms without a page refresh.
In this tutorial, I'll show you how easy it is to do just that—validate and submit a contact form without page refresh using jQuery! Let's get started.
Submit a Form Without Page Refresh Using jQuery
What We're Building
In this example, we have a simple contact form with name, email, and phone number. The form submits all the fields to a PHP script without any page refresh, using native jQuery functions.
1. Build the HTML Form
Let's take a look at our HTML markup. We begin with our basic HTML form:
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You might notice that I have included a
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Be sure to not miss that
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Another important thing is to be sure to include the
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34 values are what your jQuery script will be looking for to process the form with.
We are also doing some very basic client-side validation using HTML5 attributes like
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37 attribute will make sure that users supply a name that is at least three characters long. Similarly, the
36 attribute makes sure that users fill out all the form values you need.
You can read more about these attributes in our tutorial on validating form inputs using only HTML5 and Regex.
Form Input Validation Using Only HTML5 and Regex
Monty Shokeen
26 Mar 2021
I've added some CSS styles to produce the following form:
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2. Begin Adding jQuery
The next step in the process is to add some jQuery code. I'm going to assume that you have downloaded jQuery, uploaded to your server, and are referencing it in your webpage.
Next, open up another new JavaScript file, reference it in your HTML as you would any normal JavaScript file, and add the following:
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This function runs as soon as the HTML document is ready. If you have done any work in jQuery previously, this function is the same as jQuery's function. Inside, we will set up our validation code.
3. Write Some Form Validation
We will now write some basic form validation using jQuery. This will improve upon the validation we have so far. Using a validation library gives us more control over the error messages that are shown to users. It also requires minimal or no changes in the markup of the form.
Starting by loading the jQuery Validation library on your webpage. Now, just add the following code:
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Make sure you pass the right selector when calling the
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Using the validation library also allows you to add conditional validation logic to your forms. For example, you will be able to add code that requires a phone number only when the email address has not been provided. I have covered this in more detail in the jQuery form validation tutorial.
Easy Form Validation With jQuery
Monty Shokeen
09 Jul 2021
4. Process Form Submission With the jQuery AJAX Function
Now we get to the heart of the tutorial—submitting our form without page refresh, which sends the form values to a PHP script in the background. Let's take a look at all the code first, and then I will break it down into more detail next. Add the following code just below the validation snippet we added previously:
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There's a lot going on here! Let's break it all down—it's so simple and so easy to use once you understand the process.
We first create a string of values, which are all the form values that we want to pass along to the script that sends the email. This can be achieved pretty easily using the built-in
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I've commented out an alert that I sometimes use to be sure I am grabbing the right values, which you may find helpful in the process. If you uncomment that alert and test your form, assuming everything has gone right so far, you should get a message similar to the following:
Now we get to our main AJAX function, the star of today's show. This is where all the action happens, so pay close attention!
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Basically, what's going on in the code is this: The
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There are more advanced things you can do here, other than giving a success message. For example, you could send your values to a database, process them, and then display the results back to the user. So if you posted a poll to users, you could process their vote, and then return the voting results, all without any page refresh required.
Let's summarize what happened in our example, to be sure we have covered everything. We grabbed our form values with jQuery using the
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Then we used jQuery's
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The success part of the script has been filled in with some specific content that can be displayed back to the user. But as far as our AJAX functionality goes, that's all there is to it. For more options and settings, be sure to check out jQuery's documentation on the
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5. Display a Message Back to the User
Let's briefly look at the part of the code that displays our message back to the user, to finish out the tutorial.
First, we change the entire contents of the
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This replaces all the content inside the contact form, using jQuery's
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We'll add even more content to the message with jQuery's
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So the user ends up seeing the following after they submit the form:
Conclusion
By now, I think you will have to agree that it's incredibly easy to submit forms without page refresh using jQuery's powerful
46 function. Just get the values in your JavaScript file, process them with the
46 function, and return
63. You can process the values in your PHP script just like you would any other PHP file, the only difference being that the user does not have to wait for a page refresh—it all happens silently in the background.
So if you have a contact form on your website, a login form, or even more advanced forms that process values through a database and retrieve the results, you can do it all easily and efficiently with AJAX.
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