trouble changeing button element name 1

[KABUSA]

Hi,
***
URL:

http://www.kabusa.com/sleeves.htm

Also have various test pages sleeves3,sleeves4 and sleeves5
***
Having trouble with windows XP running on PC with some but not all users.
I use a shopping cart program that needs to read a quantity selector and button for order processing. The cart needs to know the location of the select element on the form.
I use a simple script to step through the form and number each form element.
function elnumF()
{
//assign matching form element number to each element name
var Estop = document.forms[0].elements.length;
for(var x=0; x < Estop; x++)
{
document.forms[0].elements[x].name = x;
}
}
Once this is done, the buy function determines the select element location with the buynowF function.
It is called buy the button with this code :
Onclick ="buynowF(this,17900,'TECHNICS SL-BD20',1500)";

function buynowF(element,price,part,wt)
{
var element_num = parseInt(element.name);
var qty = element_num -1;
if (part.substring(0,1) == "*") parent.frames[0].adsF();
parent.frames[0].compute(0,qty,price,part,wt);
}

The trouble is that the person who is testing this for me has confirmed that:
1. if the buttons start out having the same name (set by the HTML NAME ="ADD") then the function elnumF above changes every element.name to 39 which on this page happens to be the number of total form elements.

2. If I leave the HTML NAME= off of the input tag then ElnumF has no effect. (I thought JS would create the element if it were absent from the HTML?)
The last test I have tried, but have yet to get a report back is to set the HTLM NAME="".This way the element would exist, but have no name.

I use windows 2000 pro and test on ie6, NS4.6, opera and mozilla and do not have a problem with this code.
Can anyone provide advice on what's going on.

I assume this is a quirk with the "this" keyword.
I assume that when all the buttons have the same name, that this new element array: forms.ADD[] is overiding the form.elements[] array for this one platform. But I do not know why?
is there some other way to get the element array position using the "this" keyword?

Thankyou Kevin

 

[vongrunt]

AFAIK not directly, but you can iterate through elements.collection and compare object references like variables:

<script language="javascript">
function blah( obj )
{	oFrm = document.forms[0];
	for(i=0; i<oFrm.elements.length && oFrm.elements[i]!= obj; i++);
	
	alert(i);
}
</script>

This means that elnumF() (dirrrty...) is not necessary.