I'm trying to get a field value in JavaScript but can't for the life of me figure out how to do it. I've tried every example I can find, but can't get it to work. Some examples also require a roundtrip to the server which seems utterly pointless.

I simply need the know the value as it currently exists on the frontend. The record may be in the process of being entered, so might not exist in the backend yet, and even if it did, I'd still need to know the ID in order to get it via RPC, so back where I started.

How on Earth can it be so difficult to achieve something so simple?