Get value of form field before it's submitted

Question

I have a Django form. One of the fields (monitoring_method) uses an autocomplete-light widget that filters the results based on the entry in another field (database_type). Is there any way to get the user-entered value in the database_type field before it is submitted? I would know how to do it with AJAX (or could figure it out) but I'm not sure--and maybe this is my real question--how to incorporate AJAX with autocomplete.

class MonitoringMethodAutocomplete(autocomplete_light.AutocompleteBase):
    autocomplete_js_attributes = {'placeholder': 'Choose a database type to enable monitoring method selection'}

    def choices_for_request(self):
        q = self.request.GET.get('q', '')
        db_type = self.request.POST.get('database_type')
        # if not db_type:
        #     return []
        monitoring_methods = Database.objects.values_list('monitoring_method', flat=True)
        return monitoring_methods.filter(database_type__exact=db_type,
                                         name__icontains=q).distinct()
    def choices_for_values(self):
        return []

EDIT: So, I originally figured that what I was trying to do would not be possible, but then I realized that the q variable is doing something similar... so why isn't db_type working?

Answer 1

Yay.

<script type="text/javascript">
$(init);

function init() {
  var database_form = $('.asset-form');
  var db_type_field = $('#id_database_type');
  database_form.data('db_type', db_type_field.val());

  db_type_field.on('change', function() {
    var db_type = db_type_field.val();
    console.log(db_type);
    $('.autocomplete-light-text-widget').yourlabsAutocomplete().data = {'database_type':db_type};
  });

  // disable enter key from posting form
  $('#id_database_type').keypress( function(event) {
      if (event.which == 13) {
          event.preventDefault();
      };
    });
}

</script>