How do I submit a form with a post method in meteor without ajax?

Question

My understanding of meteor is ajax is not needed for form submission, however I am wondering how I take care of Template.form.event submit form event and do a POST rest submit in the javascript so the page does not continue on to the action destination it just sends the data and stays on the page. How do I do POST in javascript without ajax. I assume there is a obvious answer, just can't seem to think of it. Do I need to install a rest package.

I dont want the form action to be ran, but passed into javascript and sent via POST, without refreshing the page in METEOR.

Here is the form

<form accept-charset="UTF-8" action="https://formkeep.com/f/randomnumbers" method="POST" id="contact-form">
  <input type="hidden" name="utf8" value="✓">

  <input type="text" placeholder="Name">


  <input type="phone" placeholder="Phone Number">


  <input type="email" placeholder="Your Email">

  </form>

Answer 1

You're right in assuming that you don't need to use AJAX to perform a form request submission, you should use Meteor DDP protocol instead, by using a Meteor method.

First, define your Meteor method to perform the action required, here is an example :

Meteor.methods({
  addContact: function(contact){
    check(contact, {
      name: String,
      phoneNumber: String,
      email: String
    });
    //
    return Contacts.insert(contact);
  }
});

This method simply adds a contact to a collection after checking the argument has the correct format.

Next you need to call this method in your form submission event handler like this :

Template.myForm.events({
  "submit": function(event, template){
    // prevent default form submission handler : which is
    // performing an HTTP POST request that will reload the page
    event.preventDefault();
    // construct the contact object that will be passed to the method
    var contact = {
      // assuming each input fields have ids attribute
      name: template.$("#name").val(),
      phoneNumber: template.$("#phoneNumber").val(),
      email: template.$("#email").val(),
    };
    // perform the server-side asynchronous call
    Meteor.call("addContact",contact);
  }
});