Suppose you have the following form on your HTML page:

<form id="MyForm" action="process.aspx" method="POST">
  <input type="text" name="foo" />
  <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Send" />
</form>

Seems pretty innocent right? No. At least until you try to submit that form using JavaScript code. Try running the following JavaScript code on a page that contains this form inside developer tools console of your favorite browser:

document.getElementById('MyForm').submit()

You will get a lovely error, on Chrome:

TypeError: Property 'submit' of object #<HTMLFormElement> is not a function

On Internet Explorer:

Member not found.

But how come? Is submit() broken? Chrome’s error message hints that a property named submit exists but not a function. Let’s see what it is:

document.getElementById('MyForm').submit

This call will return a reference to submit button element in the form. Apparently you can access child form input elements as properties of parent form element, neat! But seriously, I need to call the submit() method. To do that I need to have a reference to the overridden function. If I had a reference to that function I know I can call it with the form reference I have in hand, thanks to call() method exists on all JavaScript functions. Using the call() method I can execute the submit() function with any instance I want. OK then, how about using another form reference’s non-overridden submit() method, let’s try this:

document.createElement('form').submit(document.getElementById('MyForm'))

Bingo! It worked. But it doesn’t feel quite right, especially creating another form element to solely access one of its methods? There should be a better way. A little research took me to this: HTMLFormElement which represents the base of all form elements and has references to all form functions accessible through its prototype, great! Let’s give the following revised code a chance:

HTMLFormElement.prototype.submit.call(document.getElementById('MyForm'))

This worked and is a reasonable solution for this problem.