In a previous post, and one that gets googled alot, I talked about trapping the enter key on an entire form.  When I endeavored to use my own code, I wondered why I did it the way I did.  I don't actually remember why I used a one second buffer to store the enter key press and cancel the form-post.  Basically, that approach is something you can add to a webform and forget about it. 

I was about to use it on a page I'm authoring and lo-and-behold, the developer ahead of me has abstrated out the web form class and removed my access to the form itself.  I have niether access to the html portion of the <form> tag nor access to the form element (or control) from the code behind.  So I modified the fuction to provide the following capability:

• trap the enter key from the onKeyPress event of an element and return false when it was the enter key
• provide the id of an alternate element to click() if the enter key was pressed

note: I debated on whether I should return false when the enter key matched.  This allows me to say onKeyPress="return trapEnterKeyPress('someElementId');" and the call to the function is pretty straight forward.  The truth is I wanted to return true when the enter key was pressed but then the call is onKeyPress="return !trapEnterKeyPress('someElementId');".  That ! is easy to miss and other developers might wonder why it doesn't work.  Splitting hairs are we?  yes!

here is the function

         //enter key trap function - traps the enter key.  
         //If an element id is provided, it will call click on that element if available.  
         //returns false if the enter key was trapped as source of event

        function trapEnterKeyPress(sElementIdToClick){

          //is it the enter key?

          var bIsEnterKey = (event.keyCode.toString() == '13');

          if(bIsEnterKey){

               //is there an alternative element to click instead?

               if(sElementIdToClick.length>0){

                 //make sure it exists and is clickable

                 var oEl=document.getElementById(sElementIdToClick);

                 if(oEl) if(oEl.click) oEl.click();

               }     

          }

          //return true if all clear (see note in article)

          return !bIsEnterKey;

        }

here's the control declaration in asp.net