Submit form on pressing Enter with AngularJS

If you only have one input you can use the form tag.

<form ng-submit="myFunc()" ...>

If you have more than one input, or don't want to use the form tag, or want to attach the enter-key functionality to a specific field, you can inline it to a specific input as follows:

<input ng-keyup="$event.keyCode == 13 && myFunc()" ...>

If you want to call function without form you can use my ngEnter directive:

Javascript:

angular.module('yourModuleName').directive('ngEnter', function() {
        return function(scope, element, attrs) {
            element.bind("keydown keypress", function(event) {
                if(event.which === 13) {
                    scope.$apply(function(){
                        scope.$eval(attrs.ngEnter, {'event': event});
                    });

                    event.preventDefault();
                }
            });
        };
    });

HTML:

<div ng-app="" ng-controller="MainCtrl">
    <input type="text" ng-enter="doSomething()">    
</div>

I submit others awesome directives on my twitter and my gist account.


I wanted something a little more extensible/semantic than the given answers so I wrote a directive that takes a javascript object in a similar way to the built-in ngClass:

HTML

<input key-bind="{ enter: 'go()', esc: 'clear()' }" type="text"></input>

The values of the object are evaluated in the context of the directive's scope - ensure they are encased in single quotes otherwise all of the functions will be executed when the directive is loaded(!)

So for example: esc : 'clear()' instead of esc : clear()

Javascript

myModule
    .constant('keyCodes', {
        esc: 27,
        space: 32,
        enter: 13,
        tab: 9,
        backspace: 8,
        shift: 16,
        ctrl: 17,
        alt: 18,
        capslock: 20,
        numlock: 144
    })
    .directive('keyBind', ['keyCodes', function (keyCodes) {
        function map(obj) {
            var mapped = {};
            for (var key in obj) {
                var action = obj[key];
                if (keyCodes.hasOwnProperty(key)) {
                    mapped[keyCodes[key]] = action;
                }
            }
            return mapped;
        }
        
        return function (scope, element, attrs) {
            var bindings = map(scope.$eval(attrs.keyBind));
            element.bind("keydown keypress", function (event) {
                if (bindings.hasOwnProperty(event.which)) {
                    scope.$apply(function() {
                         scope.$eval(bindings[event.which]);
                    });
                }
            });
        };
    }]);

Angular supports this out of the box. Have you tried ngSubmit on your form element?

<form ng-submit="myFunc()" ng-controller="mycontroller">
   <input type="text" ng-model="name" />
    <br />
    <input type="text" ng-model="email" />
</form>

EDIT: Per the comment regarding the submit button, see Submitting a form by pressing enter without a submit button which gives the solution of:

<input type="submit" style="position: absolute; left: -9999px; width: 1px; height: 1px;"/>

If you don't like the hidden submit button solution, you'll need to bind a controller function to the Enter keypress or keyup event. This normally requires a custom directive, but the AngularUI library has a nice keypress solution set up already. See http://angular-ui.github.com/

After adding the angularUI lib, your code would be something like:

<form ui-keypress="{13:'myFunc($event)'}">
  ... input fields ...
</form>

or you can bind the enter keypress to each individual field.

Also, see this SO questions for creating a simple keypres directive: How can I detect onKeyUp in AngularJS?

EDIT (2014-08-28): At the time this answer was written, ng-keypress/ng-keyup/ng-keydown did not exist as native directives in AngularJS. In the comments below @darlan-alves has a pretty good solution with:

<input ng-keyup="$event.keyCode == 13 && myFunc()"... />