Workaround: Hitting enter to submit a form in Internet Explorer does not fire an ASP.NET Button Click / Command event

Posted on July 13, 2006 by Richard Szalay

There’s a funny bug in Internet Explorer that causes it to not send FirstButtonName=FirstButtonValue as a form value when there is only 1 input type=’text’ on the page. This results in the ASP.NET Button controls not firing their Click or Command events.

Now I’ve spotted a few workarounds to this problem before, but they all involve javascript. Not very elegant, and doesn’t help those with no script.

The work around I have come up with is to add a hidden text field just after the

tag. If there are no text fields on the form, then the user cannot hit enter to submit the form and if there is, then there is technically now 2 – meaning the bug won’t occur:

A few notes:

The ‘if IE’ ensures it only gets picked up by Internet Explorer to begin with
The disabled/size attributes are for browsers with no CSS so that at least its as small as possible and the user cannot focus the cursor into it.

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2 Responses to Workaround: Hitting enter to submit a form in Internet Explorer does not fire an ASP.NET Button Click / Command event

Uzi says:

May 29, 2008 at 11:40 am

Thanks a lot! I thought I’d go mad when I couldn’t figure out what’s wrong with my page, but now I understand that it is thanks to the guys in Redmond. How did you ever find out what’s causing it?//Vince

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Stephen O says:

February 6, 2009 at 4:38 pm

Holy crap! Who would ever have thought of that. I was going crazy until I found your post. My situation was the very common one of having a single text search box and a “Go” button….Get a grip Microsoft! People don’t want to hit the button, they want to hit the Enter key!!

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