Django request.POST does not contain the name of the button that submitted the form

Question

I have a django form with two different submit buttons, on the view where the form is submitted to I need to know what submit button was pressed and take different actions accordingly.

From what I have read the submit button's name or id should be somewhere in the request.POST dictionary, but it not there!

This is a fragment of my form:

<form id="editPaperForm" action="{{paper.editURL}}" method="POST">
   <input type="submit" name="savePaperButton" id="savePaperButton" value="Save and Send Later"/>
   <input type="submit" name="sendPaperButton" id="sendPaperButton" value="Save and send"/>

   ...

</form>

In the view:

...
if 'sendPaperButton' in request.POST:
   return applicants_confirmSend(request, paperID)
else:
   return applicants_home(request)

sendPaperButton is never in the request.POST, and neither is the other one, should I be looking somewhere else?

The only idea I have is to add a hidden field and modify it via javascript before sending the form but that seems kind of redundant since I'm pretty sure that data should be there somewhere...

Thanks!

Margarethe

Have you tried looking at what your browser sends via an http debugger such as Charles or Fiddler? – Donee

No, I have not, but you got me curious about what the browser was sending so I tried a different browser (was using Firefox 3.5, tried Chrome 4 and IE6), turns out Chrome and IE6 do send the button id and value, Firefox does not... guess hidden input with Javascript added value is my only option? – Materiality

Why not use a checkbox or some other proper form element? – Donee

You could try using the button-element instead. But IE6 might have some issues with it if I recall correctly. – Retina

I tested with latest Firefox (3.5.7) and it worked fine. – Mccreary

I don't think a checkbox is appropriate for this situation. The two buttons do very different things, and checking a box is an extra step in what should be a simple button press. Anyway, I tried again this morning and now Firefox is sending it... this is very wierd... thankyou all for your suggestions anyway. – Materiality

Is there a has_key function on request.POST -- this is a blind guess, but doesn't request.POST contain a list of key/value pairs and not a list if strings? – Ligroin

Answer 1

Don't forget to add the name and value parameters to your "button" or "input type=submit" fields of the form. I've had the same problem once and it drove me crazy.

In short, as request.POST contains a dict, you need a key and a value. The key corresponds to the name parameter of your button, and the dict's value to the button's value.

<button type="submit" value="preview">Preview</button>

won't be reflected in request.POST (there's no key for the POST dictionary!), whereas

<button type="submit" value="preview" name="preview">Preview</button> 

will have a key "preview" with value "preview".

Erek

This is exactly what I forgot. Thanks for the hint! – Dwaynedweck

Having trouble in lastest version of Google Chrome with this, although it works fine with the latest version of Firefox. – Dett

This fixed a similar problem I was having where form fields had unique IDs and no name, and the POST contained no data! Was driving me nuts! Thanks! – Thicken

Answer 2

For some reason, in Chrome, when I had two buttons using <input/> tags, it would actually treat the button I didn't click as an input. That way, when I tested something like 'sendPaperButton' in request.POST, it would return the opposite of what I wanted.

I changed these to <button></button> tags and it worked fine.

Fluidize