Sharepoint form prepends WPQ2 to form names

Question

I have a custom form added as a webpart that sends to another site. Unfortunately the name attributes of each of my fields is getting prepended with WPQ2 automatically.

for example:

<input type="hidden" name="farmer" />

gets changed to

<input type="hidden" name="WPQ2farmer" />

What is going on?

Answer 1

This is how SharePoint handles web parts and the possibility that there will be multiple versions of the same web part and therefore multiples of each element. This gets especially tricky because the ID prefix cannot be counted on to stay WPQ2. If you are looking to do things client side, then you will want to work with some other containers that can be better located or use more complicated selectors that can identify the object.