How to trigger form submit programmatically in AngularJS?

Question

From Angular's documentation it follows that ngSubmit is a preferred way of submitting a form. All pending operations are immediately finished and $submitted flag is set as well. Whereas listening to ngClick event does not have the same effect.

Now I need to submit a form with hotkeys having all the goodies of ngSubmit approach. Hence I need some way to trigger standard submit workflow.

I tried submit() on DOM form and it worked, but angular's form object attached to scope contains no references to DOM form, thus I need to access it through jqLite:

var frm = angular.element('#frmId');
frm.submit();

I didn't like this solution for accessing DOM in controller code so I created a directive:

function wuSubmit() {
    return {
        require: 'form',
        restrict: 'A',
        link: function(scope, element, attributes) {
            var scope = element.scope();
            if (attributes.name && scope[attributes.name]) {
                scope[attributes.name].$submit = function() {
                    element[0].submit();
                };
            }
        }
    };
}

which extends form object with $submit method.

Both variants do not work for yet unknown reason. form.submit() tries to send data, default action is not prevented.


Update 1
It turns out that Angular listens to click events of elements having type="input".
Eventually I decided to trigger click event for that element:

wuSubmit.$inject = ['$timeout'];
function wuSubmit($timeout) {
    return {
        require: 'form',
        restrict: 'A',
        link: function (scope, element, attributes) {
            var submitElement = element.find('[type="submit"]').first();

            if (attributes.name && scope[attributes.name]) {

                scope[attributes.name].$submit = submit;
            }

            function submit() {
                $timeout(function() {
                    submitElement.trigger('click');
                });
            }
        }
    };
}

Is there any out of the box solution for this functionality?

Solution 1

Just use event .triggerHandler('submit') on form element.

myApp.directive("extSubmit", ['$timeout',function($timeout){
    return {
        link: function($scope, $el, $attr) {
            $scope.$on('makeSubmit', function(event, data){
              if(data.formName === $attr.name) {
                $timeout(function() {
                  $el.triggerHandler('submit'); //<<< This is Important

                  //equivalent with native event
                  //$el[0].dispatchEvent(new Event('submit')) 
                }, 0, false);   
              }
            })
        }
    };
}]);

Look at http://jsfiddle.net/84bodm5p/

Solution 2

app.directive("form", function(){
     return {
        require: 'form',
        restrict: 'E',
        link: function(scope, elem, attrs, form) {
            form.doSubmit = function() {
                form.$setSubmitted();
                return scope.$eval(attrs.ngSubmit);
            };
        }
    };
});

Html:

<form name="myForm" ng-submit="$ctrl.submit()" novalidate>

Then call in controller

$scope.myForm.doSubmit();

Comments

[Pavel Voronin]

nope.. the problem is not in calling the same handler. The problem is in making angular to perform all operations like it does when real submit happens.

[Shashank Agrawal]

Do you mean performing validations & all by saying "Performing all operations"?

[georgeawg]

This is a novel solution, monkey-patch the ngFormController to add a doSubmit method.