Question

In a Ruby on Rails form, I’m trying to use a button instead of link_to to go back to a main menu. I used the following (which I found from browsing this forum) :

<form><a href=/home/index><button>Main Menu</button></a></form>

If I mouse over the button, I see http://172.19.95.56:3005/home/index, which is a valid page that I can see on my browser, and that’s where I want the button to take me, but if I click on that button, it takes me to http://172.19.95.56:3005/l2vpns/1/edit, and I see the following logs on the Rails server :

Started GET "/l2vpns/1/edit" for 172.24.67.151 at 2012-03-21 10:44:26 -0700
Processing by L2vpnsController#edit as HTML
Parameters: {"id"=>"1"}
L2vpn Load (0.4ms)  SELECT "l2vpns".* FROM "l2vpns" WHERE "l2vpns"."id" = ? LIMIT 1  [["id", "1"]]
Rendered l2vpns/_form.html.erb (65.7ms)
Rendered l2vpns/edit.html.erb within layouts/application (66.5ms)
Completed 200 OK in 81ms (Views: 76.6ms | ActiveRecord: 1.2ms)

My routes are the following:

[root@localhost pocplus]# rake routes
apply_configs_l2vpns GET    /l2vpns/apply_configs(.:format)        {:action=>"apply_configs", :controller=>"l2vpns"}
          l2vpns GET    /l2vpns(.:format)                      {:action=>"index", :controller=>"l2vpns"}
                 POST   /l2vpns(.:format)                      {:action=>"create", :controller=>"l2vpns"}
       new_l2vpn GET    /l2vpns/new(.:format)                  {:action=>"new", :controller=>"l2vpns"}
      edit_l2vpn GET    /l2vpns/:id/edit(.:format)             {:action=>"edit", :controller=>"l2vpns"}
           l2vpn GET    /l2vpns/:id(.:format)                  {:action=>"show", :controller=>"l2vpns"}
                 PUT    /l2vpns/:id(.:format)                  {:action=>"update", :controller=>"l2vpns"}
                 DELETE /l2vpns/:id(.:format)                  {:action=>"destroy", :controller=>"l2vpns"}
      home_index GET    /home/index(.:format)                  {:controller=>"home", :action=>"index"}
                        /:controller(/:action(/:id(.:format))) 
            root        /                                      {:controller=>"home", :action=>"index"}
[root@localhost pocplus]# 

Anyone can tell me what am I doing wrong? Why does the button take to the “edit” page and not the /home/index one?

If this info is important, I’m using Firefox 11.0

Answer 1

Try rewriting your button as

<form><a href=/home/index><button type="button">Main Menu</button></a></form>

The default type for a button in most browsers is “submit”, so it’s trying to submit your form.