Question

I have a FormData object which I create in javascript from an HTML form like so. The FormData object doesn't seem very well documented (it may just be me searching the wrong things!).

var form = new FormData(document.getElementById("form"));

My Question

How do I access the different input values of this FormData object before I send it off? Eg. form.name accesses the value that was entered into the input with the name form.name.

Was it helpful?

Solution

It seems you can't get values of the form element using FormData.

The FormData object lets you compile a set of key/value pairs to send using XMLHttpRequest. Its primarily intended for use in sending form data, but can be used independently from forms in order to transmit keyed data. The transmitted data is in the same format that the form's submit() method would use to send the data if the form's encoding type were set to "multipart/form-data".

However you can achieve it using simple Javascript like this

var formElements = document.forms['myform'].elements['inputTypeName'].value;

OTHER TIPS

First thing I don't think it's possible to build a FormData object from a form as you've specified, and to get values from the form use the method described in the accepted answer -- this is more of an addendum!

It looks like you can get some data out of a FormData object:

var formData = new FormData();
formData.append("email", "test1@test.com");
formData.append("email", "test2@test.com");
formData.get("email");

this will only return the first item for that key, in this case it will return 'test1@test.com', to get all the email addresses use the below code

formData.getAll("email")

Please see also: MDN article on formdata get method.

FormData.get will do what you want in a small subset of browsers - look at the browser compatibility chart to see which ones (currently only Chrome 50+ and Firefox 39+). Given this form:

<form id="form">
  <input name="inputTypeName">
</form>

You can access the value of that input via

var form = new FormData(document.getElementById("form"));
var inputValue = form.get("inputTypeName");

According to MDN:

An object implementing FormData can directly be used in a for...of structure, instead of entries(): for (var p of myFormData) is equivalent to for (var p of myFormData.entries())

Therefore you can access FormData values like that:

var formData = new FormData(myForm);

for (var p of formData) {
    let name = p[0];
    let value = p[1];

    console.log(name, value)
}

This is a solution to retrieve the key-value pairs from the FormData:

var data = new FormData( document.getElementById('form') );
data = data.entries();              
var obj = data.next();
var retrieved = {};             
while(undefined !== obj.value) {    
    retrieved[obj.value[0]] = obj.value[1];
    obj = data.next();
}
console.log('retrieved: ',retrieved);

Just to add to the previous solution from @Jeff Daze - you can use the FormData.getAll("key name") function to retrieve all of the data from the object.

My solution with for-of

const formData = new FormData(document.getElementById('form'))

for (const [key, value] of formData) {
  console.log('»', key, value)
}

it will work

let form = document.querySelector("form");
let data = new FormData(form)
formObj = {};
for (var pair of data.entries()) {
  formObj[pair[0]] = pair[1]
}
console.log(formObj)

If what you're trying to do is get the content of the FormData or append to it, this is what you should use:

Let's say you want to upload an image like so:

<input type="file" name="image data" onChange={e => 
uploadPic(e)} />

On change handler function:

const handleChange = e => {
    // Create a test FormData object since that's what is needed to save image in server

   let formData = new FormData();

    //adds data to the form object

    formData.append('imageName', new Date.now());
    formData.append('imageData', e.target.files[0]);

}

append: adds an entry to the creates formData object where imageData is the key and e.target.files[0] is the property

You can now send this imageData object which contains data of the image to your server for processing

but to confirm if this formData has values a simple console.log(formData)/won't do it, what you should do is this:

//don't forget to add this code to your on change handler 
function
for (var value of formData.values()) {
   console.log(value); 
}

//I hope that explains my answer, it works for vanilla JavaScript and React.js...thanks in advance for your upvote

Another solution:
HTML:

<form>
<input name="searchtext"  type="search" >'
<input name="searchbtn" type="submit" value="" class="sb" >
</form>

JS:

$('.sb').click( function() {
    var myvar=document.querySelector('[name="searchtext"]').value;
    console.log("Variable value: " + myvar);
});

A simple HTML5 way (form to object) using the runarberg/formsquare library (npm i --save formsquare):

import formsquare from "formsquare";

const valuesObject = formsquare.filter((el) => !el.disabled).parse(document.getElementById('myForm'));
//=> {"foo": "bar"}

https://github.com/runarberg/formsquare

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