ASP.NET MVC and Multiple Submit Buttons

Every website has a form on it. If there aren’t please show me! Most of the time a form performs a single action; posting data. Sometimes you want a form to contain multiple submit buttons. There are reasons for doing this which I won’t get into, but doing this seems hard at first, but once you understand how to do it, you’ll know it’s really quite easy. This article has been split into two articles as this one focuses on submitting a form the traditional way; without JavaScript. I’m using MVC 3 in this article.

For this example I’m using this form.

One form, two submit buttons. The PostData action accepts givenName and surname.

The form will work as expected. Both submit buttons submit the form. There’s no way to differentiate which button submitted the form. The way to do this is to give the submit buttons a name. That way their values will be sent in the form’s data. Just like any successful control, if it doesn’t have a name, it won’t get submitted.

Now you need to update the action to accept the extra parameters.

This way you know exactly which submit button was pressed. From there you can route the flow of the application anyway you like. For this example I’m simply showing the user which button they pressed.

This is a simple example, but one that when you first think about how to do it, might not come to you straight away. I’ll focus on a different variation of this next week.

The entire source code of this article can be downloaded over here

This article has been editorially reviewed by Suprotim Agarwal.

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Author

Malcolm Sheridan is a Microsoft awarded MVP in ASP.NET, a Telerik Insider and a regular presenter at conferences and user groups throughout Australia and New Zealand. Being an ASP.NET guy, his focus is on web technologies and has been for the past 10 years. He loves working with ASP.NET MVC these days and also loves getting his hands dirty with jQuery and JavaScript. He also writes technical articles on ASP.NET for SitePoint and other various websites. Follow him on twitter @malcolmsheridan