When a browser auto-fills form fields, ADF doesn't "see" the new data
884628Oct 17 2012 — edited Oct 19 2012[ADF v11.1.1.5.0]
This is an interesting case reported by a user. Many modern browsers will "auto-fill" forms for you, such as your address, phone number, etc. When the browser detects multiple fields it "knows" about (like the fields in an address), when you fill out one by picking from the previous-value drop-down, it will then populate the other fields for you. Chrome is one browser that does this. (Go to Settings page, click "Show advanced settings...", then under Passwords and Forms, see the "Enable Autofill to fill out web forms in a single click". For more info, see https://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=142893&p=settings_autofill .)
For example, if there is an address form with street address, city, state, and zip, when you tab into the street address field, Chrome will display a drop-down of previously-entered values for that field. If you pick one of them (such as your home street address), then it will automatically fill in the city, state, and zip fields for you using the values you entered the last time you entered that street address. Very handy, I suppose.
The problem comes in that ADF tracks which fields the user has "touched" in the browser. It then knows which fields need to be validated/processed when you click the Submit button. (I guess the logic is that if the user didn't change the value in field "x", then there's no need to re-process field "x".) Since the user didn't actually TYPE IN the values in these other fields (e.g. city, state, zip, using the above example), but the browser put the values in for them, when they hit Submit, ADF doesn't validate those other fields. So, if those fields are required (for example), ADF will complain that the fields are empty, when the user can plainly see that they are not!
I know I can turn off auto-fill/auto-complete on a field-by-field and/or form basis, which would prevent this. However, it would prevent the user from taking advantage of this "feature" that saves them from having to type in the same thing over and over.
So, my questions are: Has anyone else encountered this before? If so, were they able to figure out how to let the browser auto-fill the fields, but somehow trigger ADF to "see" that the fields' values had changed, and therefore trigger validation on the fields when Submit is clicked?
Thanks!