Obama '08
New-formula-starburst

jQuery and Rails trick - Multiple submit buttons for a single form

14
Aug
1
posted 10:35 am in
tags / jQuery, Javascript, forms, views

Say you have a HTML form with two buttons that you each want to submit to different RESTful actions. For example, an email form with a ‘Send’ and ‘Delete’ button, which should each POST to different actions.

With some intelligent conventions, and a few lines of jQuery, we can accomplish that nicely. Here’s a simplified example.

the RHTML View

<% form_for @message, :url => '', :html => { :id => 'message' } do |f| -%>
<%= f.text_field 'subject' %>
<%= f.text_field 'body' %>
<% end -%>
<button type="button" name="send">Send</button>
<button type="button" name="save">Save as Draft</button>

jQuery

  $(document).ready(function(){
    $("button").click(function() {
      $("form#message").attr('action', '/message/' + $(this).attr('name'));
      $("form#message").submit();
    });
  });

This will enable all the buttons on the page so that when clicked, the button will submit to /message/name where name is the name attribute on the button tag.