Form Variables are not showing up after form submit. ColdFusion - forms

Question

<form name="abc" id="abc" method="post" action="/test.cfm" enctype="multipart/form-data">
<input type="submit" name="btnSubmit" id="btnSubmit" value="OK" />
</form>
for some reason when I hit submit the "btnSubmit" is not showing up in the cfdump.
<cfdump var="#form#">

Answer 1

There aren't a lot of things that could cause it to simply not appear in your form. My short-list of culprits are:
Looking at the wrong file / server.
The page is being redirected via cflocation or otherwise (javascript location.replace() or location.href=x) -- this would cause that problem even if the redirection is returning the browser to the same page.
Form variables being stripped out somewhere further up, I would guess in onRequestStart
A local variable named "variables.form" was created and set to a structure further up - not very likely, but I suppose it's possible someone could accidentally write something like <cfset form = url />, which might cause that
Usually, when something like this has happened to me in the past, I've found that I've been viewing the wrong file in the browser. Usually it's come down to me looking at the same file on the wrong domain name, e.g. looking at the production server instead of the development server.
If you combine your code segments above into a single file like this (test.cfm):
<cfdump var="#form#" />
<form name="abc" id="abc" method="post" action="test.cfm" enctype="multipart/form-data">
<input type="submit" name="btnSubmit" id="btnSubmit" value="OK" />
</form>
That ought to give you some insight into your problem. Note that I removed the leading-slash / in the form action, so that this form will post to itself. When I first view this template, I see an empty struct (followed by the button), because I haven't put anything in the form scope yet. When I submit the form I then see two elements in the structure, fieldnames and btnSubmit. That's another good indicator, if you don't see fieldnames in the form structure, then your CFML page may not have received a form submission. If you know you're looking at the right page and you've submitted the form and you still don't have the fieldnames entry, then I'd start looking for potential browser redirection.
You might also want to add an empty Application.cfc in the same directory just to be sure that there's not an application interfering with it. It's possible that something in the onRequestStart might be stripping out form variables with the name "btnSubmit" or even any form variable with the string "submit" anywhere in the name. I wouldn't expect it though -- I'd look for other causes like cflocation tags first.