jQuery Form Plugin

API

The Form Plugin API provides several methods that allow you to easily manage form data and form submission.

ajaxForm

Prepares a form to be submitted via AJAX by adding all of the necessary event listeners. It does not submit the form. Use ajaxForm in your document’s ready function to prepare your form(s) for AJAX submission. ajaxForm takes zero or one argument. The single argument can be either a callback function or an Options Object.
Chainable: Yes.

Note: You can pass any of the standard $.ajax settings to ajaxForm

$(function() {
  $('#myFormId').ajaxForm();
});

ajaxSubmit

Immediately submits the form via AJAX. In the most common use case this is invoked in response to the user clicking a submit button on the form. ajaxSubmit takes zero or one argument. The single argument can be either a callback function or an Options Object.
Chainable: Yes.

Note: You can pass any of the standard $.ajax settings to ajaxSubmit.

// attach handler to form's submit event
$('#myFormId').submit(function() {
    // submit the form
    $(this).ajaxSubmit();
    // return false to prevent normal browser submit and page navigation
    return false;
});

formSerialize

Serializes the form into a query string. This method will return a string in the format: name1=value1&name2=value2
Chainable: No, this method returns a String.

var queryString = $('#myFormId').formSerialize();
// the data could now be submitted using $.get, $.post, $.ajax, etc
$.post('myscript.php', queryString);

fieldSerialize

Serializes field elements into a query string. This is handy when you need to serialize only part of a form. This method will return a string in the format: name1=value1&name2=value2
Chainable: No, this method returns a String.

var queryString = $('#myFormId .specialFields').fieldSerialize();

fieldValue

Returns the value(s) of the element(s) in the matched set in an array. As of version .91, this method always returns an array. If no valid value can be determined the array will be empty, otherwise it will contain one or more values.
Chainable: No, this method returns an array.

// get the value of the password input
var value = $('#myFormId :password').fieldValue();
alert('The password is: ' + value[0]);

resetForm

Resets the form to its original state by invoking the form element’s native DOM method.
Chainable: Yes.

$('#myFormId').resetForm();

clearForm

Clears the form elements. This method emptys all of the text inputs, password inputs and textarea elements, clears the selection in any select elements, and unchecks all radio and checkbox inputs.
Chainable: Yes.

$('#myFormId').clearForm();

clearFields

Clears field elements. This is handy when you need to clear only a part of the form.
Chainable: Yes.

$('#myFormId .specialFields').clearFields();