Question

I have this code to wire up the confirmation dialog for delete links, which I trigger via POST.
Those links work fine when I have nothing to POST to the MVC controller action (no form elements). But when I have form elements whose values need to be POSTed back I of course need a submit button. I would also like to use similar script to wire up the confirmation dialog with a submit button too.
Essentially the dialog should pop up, wait for confirmation and if confirmed, continue with posting the form to the action.

/** Delete links wire up **/
var deleteLinkObj;
// delete Link
$('.delete-link').click(function () {
    deleteLinkObj = $(this);  //for future use
    $('#delete-dialog').dialog('open');
    return false; // prevents the default behaviour
});

/** Delete dialogs initialisation **/
var i18n_deleteButtons = {};
i18n_deleteButtons[i18n.dialogs_continue] = function () {
    $.post(deleteLinkObj[0].href, function (data) {  //Post to action
        if (data == 'True' || data == 'true') {
            deleteLinkObj.closest('tr').hide('fast'); //Hide Row
            //(optional) Display Confirmation
        }
        else {
            //(optional) Display Error
        }
    });
    $(this).dialog('close');
};

The code above obviously won’t work because a button is not a link and it has no href attribute..

Answer 1

I would do some type checking. You can use HTML5 data attributes like this:

<button data-url="yoururl" class="delete-button">Button Text</button>

And in your JS do a check:

var my_val = ( !deleteLinkObj[0].href ) ? $('.delete-button').data('url') : deleteLinkObj[0].href;

This will grab either.