Question

Say I have an Article model, and in the article ‘new’ view I have two buttons, “Publish” and “Save Draft”.

My question is how can I know which button is clicked in the controller.

I already have a solution but I think there must be a better way.
What I currently used in the view is:

<div class="actions">
  <%= f.submit "Publish" %>
  <%= f.submit "Save Draft", :name => "commit" %>
</div>

So in the controller, I can use the params[:commit] string to handle that action.

def create
  @article = Article.new(params[:article])
  if params[:commit] == "Publish"
    @article.status = 'publish'
    // detail omitted
  end

  @article.save
end

But I think using the view related string is not good. Could you tell me another way to accomplish this?

UPDATE: Since these buttons are in the same form, they’re all going to the ‘create’ action, and that’s OK for me. What I want is to handle that within the create action, such as give the Article model a ‘status’ column and holds ‘public’ or ‘draft’.

Answer 1

This was covered in Railscast episode 38. Using the params hash to detect which button was clicked is the correct approach:

View:

<%= submit_tag 'Create' %>
<%= submit_tag 'Create and Add Another', name: 'create_and_add' %>

Controller:

if params[:create_and_add]
  # Redirect to new form, for example.

else
  # Redirect to show the newly created record, for example.
end