Form values getting lost in IE8 but Firefox, IE9 works

Question

I ran into a scenario where I was thrown an unexpected behavior only in IE8 browser. IE9 and Firefox browsers work fine. The behavior went like:

1. User populated a form
2. On purpose - user leaves a mandatory field blanked
3. User clicked "Submit button" and browser sent a POST request
4. Expected behavior - error message is thrown along with data that was already provided. Only mandatory field should be left blanked as we did not provide anything in step 2. But instead I'm getting an error message with previous data lost ie form empty.

And note this only happens in IE8. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

I am going to answer this questions myself. So, here's what happened in my scenario. It was a double click problem. But I only clicked the button once. Then how did that happen? Some programmer who worked on this project was handling a form submit where he did another submit using JavaScript. But then how did this work in Firefox or IE9+?

I used Fiddler to go deep into this - I noticed in IE8 browser two requests are sent to the server. But IE9 and Firefox correctly handles this scenario (ie learns about double click) and sends only 1 POST request instead of 2.

Technologies used: Spring Framework 2.0, JSP, HTML, JavaScript

Why data is lost has also to do with Server - Spring modifies the session attributes (to be specific it's a formObject which is temporarily removed and re-added) while processing requests. When there's another request at the same time it goes through another pipeline (handleInvalidSubmit) which ends up creating a new formObject and thus destroying old data.

Hope this will help others :)