A while ago, I was asked for advice on how to support multiple submit buttons in an ASP.NET MVC application, preferably without using any JavaScript. The idea was that a form could contain more than one submit button issuing a form post to a different controller action.
The above situation can be solved in many ways, one a bit cleaner than the other. For example, one could post the form back to one action method and determine which method should be called from that action method. Good solution, however: not standardized within a project and just not that maintainable… A better solution in this case was to create an ActionNameSelectorAttribute.
Whenever you decorate an action method in a controller with the ActionNameSelectorAttribute (or a subclass), ASP.NET MVC will use this attribute to determine which action method to call. For example, one of the ASP.NET MVC ActionNameSelectorAttribute subclasses is the ActionNameAttribute. Guess what the action name for the following code snippet will be for ASP.NET MVC:
public class HomeController : Controller
{
[ActionName("Index")]
public ActionResult Abcdefghij()
{
return View();
}
}
That’s correct: this action method will be called Index instead of Abcdefghij. What happens at runtime is that ASP.NET MVC checks the ActionNameAttribute and asks if it applies for a specific request. Now let’s see if we can use this behavior for our multiple submit button scenario.
The view
Since our view should not be aware of the server-side plumbing, we can simply create a view that looks like this.
<%@ Page Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<MvcMultiButton.Models.Person>" %>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "//www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"">http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head runat="server">
<title>Create person</title>
<script src="<%=Url.Content("~/Scripts/MicrosoftAjax.js")%>" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="<%=Url.Content("~/Scripts/MicrosoftMvcAjax.js")%>" type="text/javascript"></script>
</head>
<body>
<% Html.EnableClientValidation(); %>
<% using (Html.BeginForm()) {%>
<fieldset>
<legend>Create person</legend>
<p>
<%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.Name) %>
<%= Html.TextBoxFor(model => model.Name) %>
<%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.Name) %>
</p>
<p>
<%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.Email) %>
<%= Html.TextBoxFor(model => model.Email) %>
<%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.Email) %>
</p>
<p>
<input type="submit" value="Cancel" name="action" />
<input type="submit" value="Create" name="action" />
</p>
</fieldset>
<% } %>
<div>
<%=Html.ActionLink("Back to List", "Index") %>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Note the two submit buttons (namely “Cancel” and “Create”), both named “action” but with a different value attribute.
The controller
Our controller should also not contain too much logic for determining the correct action method to be called. Here’s what I propose:
public class HomeController : Controller
{
public ActionResult Index()
{
return View(new Person());
}
[HttpPost]
[MultiButton(MatchFormKey="action", MatchFormValue="Cancel")]
public ActionResult Cancel()
{
return Content("Cancel clicked");
}
[HttpPost]
[MultiButton(MatchFormKey = "action", MatchFormValue = "Create")]
public ActionResult Create(Person person)
{
return Content("Create clicked");
}
}
Some things to note:
- There’s the Index action method which just renders the view described previously.
- There’s a Cancel action method which will trigger when clicking the Cancel button.
- There’s a Create action method which will trigger when clicking the Create button.
Now how do these last two work… You may also have noticed the MultiButtonAttribute being applied. We’ll see the implementation in a minute. In short, this is a subclass for the ActionNameSelectorAttribute, triggering on the parameters MatchFormKey and MatchFormValues. Now let’s see how the MultiButtonAttribute class is built…
The MultiButtonAttribute class
Now do be surprised of the amount of code that is coming…
[AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Method, AllowMultiple = false, Inherited = true)]
public class MultiButtonAttribute : ActionNameSelectorAttribute
{
public string MatchFormKey { get; set; }
public string MatchFormValue { get; set; }
public override bool IsValidName(ControllerContext controllerContext, string actionName, MethodInfo methodInfo)
{
return controllerContext.HttpContext.Request[MatchFormKey] != null &&
controllerContext.HttpContext.Request[MatchFormKey] == MatchFormValue;
}
}
When applying the MultiButtonAttribute to an action method, ASP.NET MVC will come and call the IsValidName method. Next, we just check if the MatchFormKey value is one of the request keys, and the MatchFormValue matches the value in the request. Simple, straightforward and re-usable.