Question

I’m a beginner, so forgive any stupidity in advance. I’m using Flask (and by extension Jinja2) to create a simple web app — one that basically lets you type a movie into a web form, which adds it to a SQLite database. I’ve gotten Flask to very nicely iterate through all the movies in the database and print them to the page upon load.

I want to include a “Delete” button next to each movie. Getting the button to appear is simple. But I’m not sure how to tie the button back to the function delete_movie() such that it will delete the correct movie associated with the button pressed.

Since there will be a button next to each movie, the form element must be dynamically named, I’m guessing. But if it’s dynamically named, how do I pass the correct value back to the function? This is what I’ve got so far:

#movies.html
<div class=page>
    <h1>Movie List</h1>
    <ul class=movies>
    {% for movie in movies %}
        <li><h1>{{ movie.title }}</h1>
        <form action="{{ url_for('delete_movie') }}" method=post class=delete-movie><input type=submit value=Delete name=movie_to_delete"></form>
    {% endfor %}
    </ul>
</div>

#app.py
@app.route('/delete', methods=['POST'])
def delete_movie():
    g.db.execute('delete from movies where movie = ?', [request.form['movie_to_delete']])
    g.db.commit()
    return redirect(url_for('list_movies'))

Thanks in advance for any help!

Answer 1

Just add a hidden input to every form with the element id/name that you want to delete as the value 🙂

eg.

<form action="{{ url_for('delete_movie') }}" method=post class=delete-movie>
  <input type=hidden value="{{ movie.name }}"name=movie_to_delete />
  <input type=submit />
</form>