How to use multiple Submit buttons in a single form having Ajax

Suroor Ahmmad picture Suroor Ahmmad · Sep 26, 2016 · Viewed 15.7k times · Source

I'm building a simple website which uses mysql as backend. I have a form which has 2 buttons of which one searches data from db and populates the page using Ajax another button updates the new values to db. Now my problem is i can't use both buttons as 'Submit' button.

Ajax Method & Html Form:

<script type="text/javascript">
     $(document).ready(function(){  
           $(document).on('submit', '#update-form', function(){
                var data = $(this).serialize();
                $.ajax({
                    type : 'POST',
                    url  : 'search.php',
                    data : data,
                    success :  function(data){
                        $(".display").html(data);
                    }
                });
                return false;
            });
        });
</script>
<body>
  <div id="update" class="tab-pane fade">
                <form id="update-form" role="form" class="container" method="post" action="search.php">
                    <h3>Update details</h3>
                    <table class="display">
                        <tr  class="space">
                            <td><label>File Number:</label></td>
                            <td><input type="text" class="form-control" name="filenum" required></td>
                        </tr>
                    </table>
                    <button type="submit" class="btn btn-default text-center" name="search_btn" >Search</button>      
                    <button type="submit" class="btn btn-default text-center"  name="submit_btn" formaction="update.php">Update</button>
                </form>
            </div>
</body>

Now i want to know how can i modify above code so that i can use both button as submit.

Tried withformaction but it doesn't work because of Ajax method usage.

Answer

Marko picture Marko · Sep 26, 2016

You can do this in many ways.

The first that come to my mind is: change the button type to be button instead of submit and add a onclick attribute

<button type="button" onclick="submitForm('search.php')">Search</button>
<button type="button" onclick="submitForm('update.php')">Update</button>

Then in your javascript:

function submitForm(url){
    var data = $("$update-form").serialize();
    $.ajax({
        type : 'POST',
        url  : url,
        data : data,
        success :  function(data){
            $(".display").html(data);
        }
    });
}