Question

say for instance I have the following button in a form in asp.net mvc 3 app:

<input type="submit" name="command" value="Click me" data-custom="D" />

I know how to get the value from the button.. however do I get the data-custom attr value in an action method? Thank you very much!!

Edit:

I should note that I’m not allowed to use javascript at all since this is a mobile version of the site for devices that do not support javascript..

Answer 1

however do I get the data-custom attr value in an action method?

No you don’t. There is nothing in the HTML specification that indicates that data-* attributes should be sent to the server when submitting a form. So if you want to get that value you will need to use javascript. One technique consists in subscribing to the submit event of the form and then automatically injecting a hidden field into that form which will be populated from the data-* attribute of the submit button. This way the value will be sent to the server.

But since I suspect that what you are trying to achieve here is that you have multiple submit buttons and you want to know which button was clicked in your controller action. In this case you could use the following:

<button type="submit" name="btn" value="S">Save</button>
<button type="submit" name="btn" value="D">Delete</button>
...

and then have your controller action take an argument called btn.

But personally I prefer to use separate actions otherwise it makes the controller action very ugly since it will contain lots of if statements. Here’s a nice blog post I would invite you to checkout.