Question

I wish to have a confirmation on a delete button, and am attempting to do it all in one line… this is the regular onClick event without the delete confimration:

onClick='this.form.action="/Config?pg=FIBiller&cmd=delete";'    

I found online that a confirm delete can be implemented as such:

"return confirm('Are you sure you want to delete?')"

How can I incorporate this into my onClick event so it’s one line, don’t want to use more javascript? If I must do so, than how would I incorporate the action for a “yes” on the message box in the javascript function?

Answer 1

If I understand you correctly, you just want

<form action="/Config?pg=FIBiller&amp;cmd=delete">
    <input type="submit" value="delete" onclick="return confirm('Are you sure you want to delete?')" />
</form>

Or if you really can’t change your form as such for some unclear reason (bad design maybe?), then you need to introduce an if-else block as follows which changes the form’s action on confirmation and returns false on cancel.

<input type="submit" value="delete" onclick="if (confirm('Are you sure you want to delete?')) form.action='/Config?pg=FIBiller&amp;cmd=delete'; else return false;" />

Note: if you want to add more calls or want to improve readability, introduce braces:

<input type="submit" value="delete" onclick="if (confirm('Are you sure you want to delete?')) { form.action='/Config?pg=FIBiller&amp;cmd=delete'; } else { return false; }" />

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Unrelated to the concrete problem, I’d suggest to get rid of cmd=delete as you could also just check that by giving the delete button a name so that it will be sent as request parameter as well:

<input type="submit" name="delete" value="delete" ...>

you could then check as follows in the JSP/Servlet side if it’s been pressed:

if (request.getParameter("delete") != null) {
    // Delete button is pressed.
}

By the way, deleting by GET is a bad idea. Rather use POST. Otherwise all delete links will be executed when a searchbot comes along your website and crawls all GET links/actions without executing JavaScript. You also don’t want the resulting delete requests to be bookmarkable, right?