How can I set/select a field in the display form?

Question

I'm in a SharePoint Display form and want to do some calculations on the client's side to populate a blank single line of text field.

In an edit form, to set and select my value I have something like this:

$("input[title='My Field Here']").value(time);

But the display form seems to hold values a lot differently (in a table). How would I go about selecting a value from my field when it's stored like this with (seemingly) no unique identifiers:

<td width="450px" valign="top" id="SPFieldDateTime" class="ms-formbody">
        <!-- FieldName="MyDate"
             FieldInternalName="MyDate"
             FieldType="SPFieldDateTime"
          -->
            3/26/2014

        </td>

I don't think I can select anything based on the comment that's there (would be nice..), but if all of my fields are contained within "td" and there's more than one "SPFieldDateTime", how can I select this specific field's value of 3/26/2014?

edit:

I left this part out which appears just above the above line.

<a name="SPBookmark_MyDate"></a>

Answer 1

Using jQuery, find the nearest item with a unique identifier. Not all fields in a form have unique IDs, as you found with the date fields, which all have the id="SPFieldDateTime". The corresponding label column, however, contains the field name and this one must be unique.

Use this as your hook. You can then go to the sibling of the unique element with the class name "ms-formbody". For example:

$('td.ms-formlabel:contains("Text2")').siblings(".ms-formbody").css("background", "yellow");

will show

Or to retrieve the text value use something like

$('td.ms-formlabel:contains("Text2")').siblings(".ms-formbody").text() 

for example in an alert:

alert($('td.ms-formlabel:contains("Text2")').siblings(".ms-formbody").text()); 

Or hide the row altogether with

$('td.ms-formlabel:contains("Text2")').parent().hide();