title: getting contents of SharePoint:FormFields
body: <p>I'm sorry if this is really obvious, however, I haven't found ANYTHING that explains it... using a SharePoint:FormField. I've found countless resources on how to do the following in HTML, but when I've tried to apply it to SharePoint jQuery breaks!!</p>
  
  <p>So I have a SharePoint:FormField like the following</p>
  
  <pre><code>                     &lt;tr&gt;
                          &lt;td width="190px" valign="top" class="ms-formlabel"&gt;
                              &lt;H3 class="ms-standardheader"&gt;
                                  &lt;nobr&gt;Request Type&lt;span class="ms-formvalidation"&gt; *&lt;/span&gt;
                                  &lt;/nobr&gt;
                              &lt;/H3&gt;
                          &lt;/td&gt;
                          &lt;td width="400px" valign="top" class="ms-formbody"&gt;
                              &lt;SharePoint:FormField runat="server" id="ff3{$Pos}" ControlMode="New" FieldName="requestType" __designer:bind="{ddwrt:DataBind('i',concat('ff3',$Pos),'Value','ValueChanged','ID',ddwrt:EscapeDelims(string(@ID)),'@requestType')}"/&gt;
                              &lt;SharePoint:FieldDescription runat="server" id="ff3description{$Pos}" FieldName="requestType" ControlMode="New"/&gt;
                          &lt;/td&gt;
                      &lt;/tr&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And I'm just trying to get the value of SOMETHING, ANYTHING to appear in an alert, but it's giving me an undefined alert</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;script type="text/javascript"&gt;
  $(document).ready(function(){
      var myVar = $("SharePoint:FormField[FieldName]").val()
      alert(myVar);
      // result "undefined"
  });
  &lt;/script&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Please help. Many Thanks!</p>