How can I assign different actions for different submit buttons in same html form?

Question

I am trying to assign different actions to same html form according to different submit buttons.

Can I do something like this ?

<FORM>
------
<INPUT type="submit" value="DoSomething" action="DoSomething.pl" method="POST">
<INPUT type="submit" value="DoSomethingElse" action="DoSomethingElse.pl" method="POST">
<FORM/> 

Solution 1

No. A form has only one action (action being a property of the form, not the submit button).

The target of the action can do different things on the basis of the values in the form. So, you might want to start naming your submit buttons.

Learn HTML before you even think about writing and deploying a CGI script.

<form method="POST" action="/cgi-bin/script">
<input type="submit" name="action" value="DoSomething">
<input type="submit" name="action" value="DoSomethingElse">
</form>

Note also that choosing an action based on the value of the submit button is a losing strategy if you wish to internationalize the application because the value of a submit button is what the UA displays to humans.

Therefore, script should decide what to do on the basis of some other input element's value.

For example, CGI::Application looks at a run_mode parameter.

Alternatively, you can use different names for your submit buttons as Alec suggests. In that case, you need to check which submit button was pressed by going through the names of the parameters passed to your script which, IMHO, makes the dispatch slightly more cumbersome. It also means it is possible for someone to pass values for all submit buttons to your script (not via the user interface, but via curl or wget or similar programs.

For example, given the HTML

<form method="POST" action="/cgi-bin/script">
<input type="submit" name="submit_left" value="Go Left">
<input type="submit" name="submit_right" value="Go Right">
</form>

here is how your script may handle form submission:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict; use warnings;

use CGI::Simple;

my $cgi = CGI::Simple->new;

my %dispatch = (
    left  => \&handle_left,
    right => \&handle_right,
);

my @actions = grep s/^action_(right|left)\z/$1/, $cgi->param;

my $handler = \&handle_invalid_action;

if ( @actions == 1) {
    my ($action) = @actions;
    if ( exists $dispatch{ $action } ) {
        $handler = $dispatch{ $action };
    }
}
else {
    $handler = \&handle_too_many_actions;
}

$handler->($cgi);

sub handle_left { }
sub handle_right { }
sub handle_invalid_action { }

# because it may indicate someone trying to abuse your script
sub handle_too_many_actions { }

Solution 2

Just in case someone else finds this post:

If you're using HTML5, this is now easier thanks to the formaction attribute. This attribute applies to input and button elements of type="submit" and forces the form to submit to the location specified in the formaction attribute of the clicked element.

Then only drawback of this attribute is that it's not supported by Internet Explorer 9 and lower, but this limitation can be easily overcome using a little JavaScript.

Example:

<form method="post" action="go_default">
    <input type="submit" value="Go Left" formaction="go_left" />
    <input type="submit" value="Go Right" formaction="go_right" />
</form>

For IE 9 and lower:

<script type="text/javascript">
   $(function () {
      var $submit = $('form [type="submit"][formaction]');

      $submit.click(function() {
          var $this  = $(this),
              action = $this.prop('formaction'),
              $form  = $this.closest('form');

          $form.prop('action', action).submit();
      });
   });
</script>