Question

I’ve got a form that has multiple submit buttons. One for changing data in a database, one for adding, and one for deleting. It looks like this:

<form action="addform.php" method="post" id="addform" onSubmit="return validate(this)">
<select name="listings" id="listings" size="1" onChange="javascript:updateForm()">
<!-- Here I have a php code that produces the listing menu based on a database query-->
</select>
<br />
Price: <input type="text" name="price" id="price" value="0"/><br />
Remarks:    <textarea name="remarks" wrap="soft" id="remarks"></textarea><br />
<input type="submit" value="Update Database Listing" name="upbtn" id="upbtn" disabled="disabled"/>
<input type="submit" value="Delete Database Listing" name="delbtn" id="delbtn" disabled="disabled"/>
<br />
<input type="submit" value="Add Listing to Database" name="dbbtn" id="dbbtn"/>
<input type="button" value="Update Craigslist Output" name="clbtn" id="clbtn" onClick="javascript:updatePreview();"/>
</form>

There are actually more elements in the form, but that doesn’t matter. What I want to know is, for my validation method, how can I check which submit button has been clicked?

I want it to do the following:

    function validate(form){
      if (the 'add new listing' or 'update listing' button was clicked'){
        var valid = "Are you sure the following information is correct?" + '\\n';
        valid += "\\nPrice: $";
        valid += form.price.value;
        valid += "\\nRemarks: ";
        valid += form.remarks.value;
        return confirm(valid);}
      else {
                    return confirm("are you sure you want to delete that listing");
      }
    }

I assume there must be some way to do this relatively easily?

Answer 1

Why don’t you set a global variable specifying which button was last clicked? Then you can check this variable in your validate method. Something like:

var clicked;

$("#upbtn").click(function() {clicked = 'update'});
// $("#delbtn").click(function() {clicked = 'delete'});
// ... 

function validate(form) {
    switch(clicked) {
    case 'update':
        break;
            // more cases here ...
    }
}