window.location.href not working

Question

My website is http://www.collegeanswerz.com/. I'm using rails. The code is for searching for colleges. I want the user to be able to type in the colleges name, click enter, and be taken to the url, rather than seeing the search results (if the user types in the name properly. if not I want to show the search results). I'm using "a" and "stackoverflow.com" as placeholders while I try to get it to work.

I'm using window.location.href based on this: How to redirect to another webpage in JavaScript/jQuery?

javascript

$("#search_text").submit(function() {
    if ($("#search_field").val() == "a")
    {
        window.location.href = "http://stackoverflow.com";
        alert('worked');
    }
});

layout file

<%= form_tag("/search", :method => 'get', :id => 'search_text', :class => 'form_search') do -%> 
    <div id="search"> <%= search_field_tag :search, params[:search], :placeholder => 'enter college', :id => "search_field", :class => 'input-medium search-query' %></div> 
<% end -%>

static_pages_controller.rb

def search
  @colleges = College.search(params[:search])
end

The alert is working, which tells me that the things inside the if statement should be being executed. But it's taking me to the normal search results instead of stackoverflow.com. Why is this?

Answer 1

The browser is still submitting the form after your code runs.

Add return false; to the handler to prevent that.

Answer 2

Try this

`var url = "http://stackoverflow.com";    
$(location).attr('href',url);`

Or you can do something like this

// similar behavior as an HTTP redirect
window.location.replace("http://stackoverflow.com");

// similar behavior as clicking on a link
window.location.href = "http://stackoverflow.com";

and add a return false at the end of your function call