How to prevent special characters input into Edit Box

Question

I added validateConstraint module to my edit box and it works fine when you submit the form:

<xp:validateConstraint
message="Only letters, numbers and the space character allowed in this field">
<xp:this.regex><![CDATA[^[a-zA-Z0-9_ ]*$]]></xp:this.regex>
</xp:validateConstraint>

But how do I prevent entering/paste such characters. Assume I need to put some replace statement into keyDown event but cannot figure out what exactly.

Why don't you just run the whole string through a loop to only accept certain characters, no matter what they entered? You can do this when the field is submitted, rather than trying to do it on the fly (which might get clunky). — durbnpoisn, Nov 12 '15 at 20:21
this is just natural to block some characters from entering. And as I wrote above validateConstraint works fine — VladP, Nov 12 '15 at 20:28
Here's an example: http://stackoverflow.com/a/14806351/785061 — Per Henrik Lausten, Nov 12 '15 at 20:48

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:03

You can use the onkeypress event to limit just the characters you want to accept.

This doesn't validate the special characters, it doesn't allow the user to type them. Here is a site that will tell you the keycode: http://keycode.info/

For example, this will just allow numbers:

var keyCode = event.keyCode;
if((keyCode >= 48 && keyCode <= 57) ||keyCode == 8){
    event.returnValue = true;
}else{
    event.returnValue = false;
}

You could also reverse this and selectively exclude special characters by their keycode.

Here is a picture of how I do it. I don't use JQuery like the link in the comments, although that certainly works too:

One caveat: For use in a Edit box (in XPages), the keypad characters work the same even though they have different keycodes. In some cases, like a Dojo Comboxbox, you need to also specify both the normal numbers, and the keypad numbers. keyCode values for numeric keypad?

Here is a blog post I wrote on this subject: http://notesspeak.blogspot.com/2015/11/limiting-keyboard-input-in-xpages.html — Steve Zavocki, Nov 17 '15 at 16:59

How to prevent special characters input into Edit Box

1 Answers1