By davedelong on

Hi everyone,

I'm building a form to track course data for university students. You can see the layout of the form here:
http://davedelong.com/content/one-form-many-submit-buttons

What I'd like to happen is when the user clicks the "Remove" button corresponding to the course they'd like to remove, then the form is submitted, I determine which remove button was clicked, and remove the appropriate course.

However, submit buttons in FAPI are tied to the #value attribute, and since each submit button has the same #value ("Remove"), I can't tell which button is being clicked.

How can I work around this? I'd like to keep all the "Remove" buttons titled "Remove" but still be able to differentiate between them all.

Thanks,

Dave

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

grobemo’s picture

grobemo commented

You could change the 'Remove' buttons from Submit buttons to Button buttons and add a hidden field to the form. Use JavaScript to set a click event for each button that (1) sets the value of the hidden field to the course number for the course to be removed, and (2) submits the form. Once you receive the data, just read the value of that hidden field.

davedelong’s picture

davedelong commented

Thanks for the idea, davidmorrow. I'm trying what you suggested, and I've hit a snag.

When I build the form, I declare the Remove buttons like so:

$form['course'.$id]['remove'] = array(
	'#type' => 'submit',
	'#value' => 'Remove',
	'#attributes' => array(
		'onclick' => "$('#edit-clicked-course').val('".$id."');"
	)
);

Then I also have this in the form declaration:

$form['clicked_course'] = array(
	'#type' => 'hidden',
	'#value' => ''
);

When the form is submitted, clicked_course doesn't have a value! I added an "alert($('#edit-clicked-course).val());" in the onclick() event to verify that it was getting the correct value, and it was, but somehow that value isn't getting submitted.

Any ideas why?

Thanks!

Dave

davedelong’s picture

davedelong commented

Interesting, I just found the value inside $_POST['clicked_course'], but not in $_GET and not in the $form_values array either.

Odd.

grobemo’s picture

grobemo commented

I think you'll want to change '#value' to '#default_value' in the $form['clicked_course'] array. According to the API documentation on #value, #value sets a value that cannot be edited by the user, whereas #default_value just sets the initial value. So it's probably getting sent with $_POST and then overwritten on the server side.

davedelong’s picture

davedelong commented

That was the piece I was missing. It works perfect now! Thanks, davidmorrow! :)

basserc999’s picture

basserc999 commented

Anyone trying to use this technique for Drupal 7 will find that since the id attribute has been removed from hidden fields in forms, you cannot use $('#edit-whatever') to change the value.

The fix is easy, however, since you can still use jQuery attribute selectors, e.g. $('input[name=whatever]'). Hope this helps anyone trying to use this technique.

dalin’s picture

dalin
he/him
Primary language English
Location 🇨🇦, 🇲🇽, 🌍
commented

I wanted my form to gracefully degrade so instead I have each button with a different #value and use CSS to make them all appear the same.

________________________
Dave Hansen-Lange
Director of Technical Strategy, FourKitchens.com

paul2’s picture

paul2 commented

I wasn't satisfied with any of the proposed solutions above (I don't want to have to resort to JavaScript, or dirty CSS tricks), and finally discovered that if you provide each submit button with a unique ['#name'] property, it will work as expected. That is, the chosen button will be properly identified by $form_state['triggering_element'], even it shares the same ['#value'] as other submit buttons.

Again, not sure why I had such a hard time discovering this... it seriously should be documented, but isn't, anywhere. In fact, the ['#name'] property on the FAPI reference page is hardly documented at all, even when there's such an important use for it! But anyway, there you go. Hope this helps someone.

ice_vita’s picture

ice_vita commented

yes it helped very much. thanks.

mamanerd’s picture

mamanerd commented

Wow, I wasted hours trying to get the multiple submit buttons to work properly before finding this simple fix. *Sigh*

nickgs’s picture

nickgs commented

Thanks Paul,

This snagged me last night. Simple solution.