Reputation: 11650

HTML input fields does not get focus when clicked

I have a problem and I can't figure out what exactly is causing this behavior. I cannot access my input fields and textareas on my HTML form.

Unfortunately, the JS, HTML and CSS are very large, so I can't really post it all here.

Can anybody tell me what to look for when debugging this strange behavior?

UPDATE

If I move the cursor over the input field I can see the text cursor, but when I click it the field does not get the focus. I can access the field via pressing the Tab key and if I right click on it and then click on the field I also get the focus for it.

...and nope, they don't have the disabled or readonly attributes ;-)

Upvotes: 86

Answers (30)

Ax34

Reputation: 123

I know this is a dead thread, but for anyone happen to stumble into this problem the problem I hope that helps.

The problem

When on Firefox for some reason whenever re-enabling a fieldset some inputs under it would be "broken", which means that I could click on them but not edit them, though if I tried to edit via script (doing things like input.value = "hello") it would work, but still they couldn't be editable.

The code I had was like this:

function enable_form() {
  let form = document.querySelector("#form1");
  form.querySelector("fieldset").disabled = false;
}

Note: works only on firefox, and it "breaks" one (or more) random inputs

<form id="form1">
  <fieldset disabled>
    <input type="text" name="input1" id="input1">
    <input type="text" name="input2" id="input2">
    <input type="text" name="input3" id="input3">
    <input type="text" name="input4" id="input4">
  </fieldset>
</form>

<button onclick="enable_form()">enable form</button>

Why this happens

This happens because apparently Firefox for some reason saves the "disabled" attribute of all inputs under a form (input1, input2, etc.) to be used whenever reloading the page (to avoid recompiling everything) because of the autocomplete tag attribute.

And all inputs since they're not directly disabled (by putting "disabled" in the input tag) Firefox tries to inherit this state from the closest parent (in this case the fieldset), and for some reason sometimes for some input it won't recalculate correctly the value of the disabled flag and thus it appears enabled but actually it's not.

How to solve

The fastest solution is to manually enable or disable all inputs under a script, for example by doing
form_element.querySelectorAll("input, select").disabled = false or true, depends on what you're doing.

Upvotes: 0

Rinshan Kolayil

Reputation: 1139

It might be because of invalid for attribute in the label attribute

<input type="text" id="your_name" name="your_name">
<label for="your_name">Your Name</label>

<input type="text" id="your_email" name="your_name">
<label for="your_name">Your Name</label>

I have tried to update the for attribute in the second label to your_email instead of your_name and its works for me

<label for="your_email">Your Name</label>

Upvotes: 2

avisk

Reputation: 390

For Anyone Using Electron

For anyone having this issue with Electron specifically, the problem for me was using alert before selecting the input fields. Apparently alert and confirm aren't entirely supported by Electron, and therefore can mess up input fields. If you'd still like to use them, refer to this post: https://stackoverflow.com/a/38859135/12293837

Upvotes: 3

Anthony Cregan

Reputation: 983

Its worth adding that having the property pointer-events:none on your input label will also produce this unwanted behaviour.

Upvotes: 2

GaddBox

Reputation: 412

I had this same issue just now in React.

I figured out that in the Router, Route. We cannot do this as it causes this issue of closing the mobile keyboard.

<Route 
 path = "some-path"
 component = {props => <MyComponent />}
 />

Make sure and use the render instead in this situation

<Route 
 path = "some-path"
 render = {props => <MyComponent />}
 />

Hope this helps someone

Daniel

Upvotes: 0

Ciro Corvino

Reputation: 2128

I had this issue caused by a sort of overlap of a div element with a bootstrap class ="row" over a "brother" div element with the class="col", the first hid the focus of the second div element.

I solved taking outer the div row element from that level of the divs' tree and so rebalancing bootstrap logical hierarchy based on the row and col classes.

Upvotes: 0

Andrei Dragomir

Reputation: 309

I had the same issue and the fix was to remove the placeholders and I changed the design of the form to use labels instead of placeholders...

Upvotes: 0

Amr Ibrahim

Reputation: 2234

iPhone6 chrome

Problem for me was placing the input field inside <label> and <p>

like this :

<label>
  <p>
     <input/>
  </p>
</label>

I changed them to

<div>
  <div>
     <input/>
  </div>
</div>

And it works for me .

After check this answer, Please check other answers in this page, this issue may have different reasons

Upvotes: 1

James

Reputation: 35

I had this issue using Bootstrap + contact form 7. I for some reason I put the label as the container of the form and that was the issue for not being selectable on mobile.

<label>
    <contact form>...</contact form>
</label>

Seemed to break all inputs except the first input and the submit.

Upvotes: 0

mr_j

Reputation: 135

I had the same problem. Tore my hair for hours trying all sorts of solutions. Turned out to be an unclosed a tag.Try validate your HTML code, solution could be an unclosed tag causing issues

Upvotes: 0

Gendos-ua

Reputation: 383

In my case it was Bootstrap popup in opened state. Text input was in another calendar popup on top of Bootstrap one, input got its focus back after removing tabindex="-1" attribute from Bootstrap modal.

Upvotes: 1

James Westgate

Reputation: 11444

This can occur in bootstrap if you do not place your columns inside a <div class ='row'>. The column floats are not cleared and you could get the next column overlying the previous, hence clicks wont hit the dom elements where you expect.

Upvotes: 5

elvin

Reputation: 981

I just found another possible reason for this issue, some input textboxes were missing the closing "/", so i had <input ...> when the correct form is <input ... />. That fixed it for me.

Upvotes: 1

Aleks

Reputation: 5330

I have read all the answers above, and some directed me to the problem, but not to the solution for the problem.

The root cause of the problem is disableSelection(). It is causing all the problems, but removing it is not a solution, as (at least in 2016 or slightly before), on touch-screen devices, you "have" to use this if you want to be able to move objects with jQuery.

The solution was to leave the disableSelection() to the sortable element, but also add a binding action just above:

 $('#your_selector_id form').bind('mousedown.ui-disableSelection selectstart.ui-disableSelection', function(event) {
    event.stopImmediatePropagation();
 })

The form in the jQuery element is just to stop propagation on the form, as you might need propagation on some elements.

Upvotes: 5

Frank

Reputation: 21

the problem for me was that I was using class="modal fade", I changed it for class="modal hide". That solved the issue.

Upvotes: 0

Emad Morris Zedan

Reputation: 301

I'm using JQuery UI and Bootstrap so I faced this issue and I think it is a conflict between the two as in normal case the textarea or the input filed is editable by nature but I made this solution after testing all the above answers but none solve the cross browser support for all major browsers, but I solved it and I like to share my solution you can use it on input text and textarea

(Tested on Desktop: IE (All Versions), Chrome, Safari, Windows Edge, Firefox, Visual Studio Cordova Ripple Viewer on Windows & Visual Studio Cordova Windows 10 Store App)

(Tested on Mobile: Chrome, Firefox, Android Internet Browser & Visual Studio Cordova App on Android & Visual Studio Cordova Windows 8 + 8.1 + 10 Phone App)

This is the HTML Code:

<textarea contenteditable id="textarea"></textarea>

This is The CSS Code:

textarea {
    -webkit-user-select: text !important;
    -khtml-user-select: text !important;
    -moz-user-select: text !important;
    -ms-user-select: text !important;
    user-select: text !important;
    /*to make sure that background color and text color is not the same (from the answers above)*/
    background-color:#fff !important;
    color:#733E27 !important;
 }

This Is The JQuery Code On Document Ready

$("textarea").click(function() {
        setTimeout(function(){
            $("textarea").focus();
            //add this if you are using JQuery UI (From The Solutions Above)
            $("textarea").enableSelection();
            var val = $("textarea").val();
            if (val.charAt(val.length-1) !== " " && val.length !== 1) {
                alert(val.length);
                val += " ";
            }
            $("textarea").val(val);
        }, 0);
    });

    if (navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Safari') !== -1 || navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Chrome') !== -1) {
        //alert('Its Safari or chrome');
        $("textarea").onfocus(function(e) {
            setTimeout(function(){
                var end;
                if ($("textarea").val === "") {
                    end = 0;
                } else {
                    end = $("textarea").val.length;
                }
                if ($("textarea").setSelectionRange) {
                    var range = document.getElementById('textarea').createTextRange();
                    if (range) {
                        setTimeout(range, 0, [end, end]);
                    } else { // IE style
                        var aRange = document.getElementById('textarea').createTextRange();
                        aRange.collapse(true);
                        aRange.moveEnd('character', end);
                        aRange.moveStart('character', end);
                        aRange.select();
                    }
                }
                e.preventDefault();
                return false;
            }, 0);
        });
    }

You can test it on my web application at www.gahwehsada.com

Upvotes: 2

gunslingor

Reputation: 1476

I had this problem for over 6 months, it may be the same issue. Main symptom is that you can't move the cursor or select text in text inputs, only the arrow keys allow you to move around in the input field. Very annoying problem, especially for textarea input fields. I have this html that gets populated with 1 out of 100s of forms via Javascript:

<div class="dialog" id="alert" draggable="true">
    <div id="head" class="dialog_head">
        <img id='icon' src='images/icon.png' height=20 width=20><img id='icon_name' src='images/icon_name.png' height=15><img id='alert_close_button' class='close_button' src='images/close.png'>
    </div>
    <div id="type" class="type"></div>
    <div class='scroll_div'>
        <div id="spinner" class="spinner"></div>
        <div id="msg" class="msg"></div>
        <div id="form" class="form"></div>
    </div>
</div>

Apparently 6 months ago I had tried to make the popup draggable and failed, breaking text inputs at the same time. Once I removed draggable="true" it works again!

Upvotes: 2

Alex Vaghin

Reputation: 295

I had the similar issue - could not figure out what was the reason, but I fixed it using following code. Somehow it could not focus only the blank inputs:

$('input').click(function () {
        var val = $(this).val();
        if (val == "") {
            this.select();
        }
    });

Upvotes: 3

Maccurt

Reputation: 13817

I had the same problem. I eventually figured it out by inspecting the element and the element I thought I had selected was different element. When I did that I found there was a hidden element that had z-index of 9999, once I fixed that my problem went away.

Upvotes: 0

frediano

Reputation: 31

This will also happen anytime a div ends up positioned over controls in another div; like using bootstrap for layout, and having a "col-lg-4" followed by a "col-lg=8" misspelling... the right orphaned/misnamed div covers the left, and captures the mouse events. Easy to blow by that misspelling, - and = next to each other on keyboard. So, pays to examine with inspector and look for 'surprises' to uncover these wild divs.

Is there an unseen window covering the controls and blocking events, and how can that happen? Turns out, fatfingering = for - with bootstrap classnames is one way...

Upvotes: 0

CMM

Reputation: 33

Just in case someone else is looking for this answer, we had a similar problem and solved it by changing the z-index of the input tags. Apparently some other divs had extended too far and were overlapping the input boxes.

Upvotes: 3

karlingen

Reputation: 14625

I had this problem because of this code:

$("#table tbody tr td:first-child").bind("mousedown", function(e){
    e.preventDefault();
    $(this).parents('tr').removeClass('draggable');
});

I resolved it by removing

e.preventDefault();

New code:

$("#table tbody tr td:first-child").bind("mousedown", function(){
    $(this).parents('tr').removeClass('draggable');
});

Upvotes: 2

aka

Reputation: 103

If you are faced this problem while using canvas with DOM on mobile devices, the answer of Ashwin G worked for me perfectly, but I did it through javascript

var element = document.getElementById("myinputfield");
element.onclick = element.select();

After, everything worked flawlessly.

Upvotes: 4

Ashwin G

Reputation: 1570

Use the onclick="this.select()" attribute for the input tag.

Upvotes: 24

Gerson

Reputation: 51

I had this problem too, and in my case I found that the color of the font was the same color of the background, so it looked like nothing happened.

Upvotes: 5

bill snider

Reputation: 249

I know this is a very old thread, but this just happened to me recently; took me a while to figure it out.

This same issue can be caused by putting 'input' elements inside of pair of 'label' tags.

In my case, I had intended to create a pair of 'div' tags but instead I accidently created a pair of 'label' tags, then inserted some text input fields 'input type="text"..' using DOM.

It displayed normally on the screen, but when I clicked on any of the text fields, the cursor kept jumping back to the first 'input' and really acting erratic.

Took me a while to figure this out because this behavior is subtle, and not at all what I would have expected from making this kind of mistake.

bsnider

Upvotes: 24

Tim B James

Reputation: 20364

When you say

and nope, they don't have attributes: disabled="disabled" or readonly ;-)

Is this through viewing your html, the source code of the page, or the DOM?

If you inspect the DOM with Chrome or Firefox, then you will be able to see any attributes added to the input fields through javasript, or even an overlaying div

Upvotes: 1

Armin

Reputation: 15958

I had this problem too. I used the disableSelection() method of jQuery UI on a parent DIV which contained my input fields. In Chrome the input fields were not affected but in Firefox the inputs (and textareas as well) did not get focused on clicking. The strange thing here was, that the click event on these inputs worked.

The solution was to remove the disableSelection() method for the parent DIV.

Upvotes: 29

DoubleL

Reputation: 81

This happens sometimes when there are unbalanced <label> tags in the form.

Upvotes: 8

Andy E

Reputation: 344565

when i click it the field does not get the focus. i can access the field via pressing the "tab-key"

It sounds like you've cancelled the default action for the mousedown event. Search through your HTML and JS for onmousedown handlers and look for a line that reads.

return false;

This line may be stopping you from focusing by clicking.

Re: your comment, I'm assuming you can't edit the code that adds this handler? If you can, the simplest solution is to just remove the return false; statement.

is there a way to just add functionality to the event-trigger by not overwriting it?

That depends on how the handler is attached. If it's attached using the traditional registration method, e.g. element.onmousedown, then you could create a wrapper for it:

var oldFunc = element.onmousedown;
element.onmousedown = function (evt) {
    oldFunc.call(this, evt || window.event);
}

Since this "wrapper" doesn't return false, it will not cancel the default action (focusing) for the element. If your event is attached using an advanced registration method, such as addEventListener or attachEvent then you could only remove the event handler using the function name/reference and reattach it with a wrapped function similar to the above. If it's an anonymous function that's added and you can't get a reference to it, then the only solution would be to attach another event handler and focus the element manually using the element.focus() method.

Upvotes: 59

HTML input fields does not get focus when clicked

Answers (30)

The problem

Why this happens

How to solve

For Anyone Using Electron

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