Submit Button without a form

Question

So what I want is a button, that when clicked, sends an article id to a php page through GET request, and the PHP page generates a PDF summary of my article.

Now this is fairly simple to do if I had a form tag, but I don't and I can't have one since my button is in a table, and as far as I know, forms cannot exist in tables. I still tried using a form tag but it was breaking my site so that's not an option.

The following is what I have:

echo "<td><button type=\"submit\" formaction=\"wp-content/themes/csed/data-entry/results.php\" formmethod=\"get\"class=\"button\" name=\"id\" value=\"" .$single->idArticle. "\" formtarget=\"_blank\">PDF</button></td>";

As you can see, I tried using the formaction attribute to make this work, but right now, my button does not do anything. Anything at all. What am I doing wrong? Is what I'm trying to achieve even possible?

Solution

If you can not place the button into the form element, you can associate it to one via the form's ID:

<form id="myform"></form>

...

<button form="myform" ... >

So the <form> element can be anywhere else in the hypertext document, be it before or even after the button. The button must not be a descendant of the form.

I quickly compiled this rudimentary example from the MDN docs which are available in different languages even (although I as non native English speaker normally prefer the English variant):

• <button>: The Button element (MDN)

Comments

[Ching Ling]

I am aware of this approach. However, not what I'm looking for. What I want is a way to submit data via GET without the use of a form. I was just reading up and looks like its possible using jquery and ajax. Thank you for your answer though.

[hakre]

@ChingLing: Better read the link instead of stacking even more stuff on top: formmethod="get" and the button will do the get request. It is all in there. Don't stop that early, esp. if you're new to the tech you're using, e.g. your HTML seems either quite new or rusty (-;.

[Ching Ling]

@hakreI am using the formmethod="get" in my button. Its still not working. See my code in the OP. I'm guessing that's because of what you and other's mentioned, I am missing the form tags? What I want to do is achieve this without having a form. Are you saying that that's possible?

[hakre]

You probably need to add the query parameters to the action. This is at least how it works in PHP (or you add the input fields but as you only have one parameter I would start w/ query parameters here). And yes, with a standard link it is possible w/o a form as the GET request is the standard request for links. If you understand the basics, you can be creative finding any kind of solution you need. See this Q&A for example: stackoverflow.com/q/2906582/367456 (and see the upvotes, you're not alone at all)