What should I do when more than one submit cases exist

Question

I have a form where I fill in a blank and then save it, which takes me to the read only version of the entry I've just saved. At this step I have 2 options: Either "Confirm" or "Cancel". Both actions will update some values in the database, so they're both good candidates for submit button(HttpPost, of course). I know this shouldn't be tied to a particular web development technology as all-in-all it's all about Request and Response, but still I'll talk in ASP.NET MVC "language" as that is what I'm using now. So far, the only idea that has come to my mind is to have a separate submit buttons with different names and on the server side check for the name and act accordingly. But this seems a bit ugly to me as I might have to have a huge and universal action method. Do you have any better approach? Maybe MVC has some built in way for this purpose?

Answer 1

You could do this with 2 forms, each posting to different action methods:

<form method="post" action="/cancelAction">
    <input name="id" type="hidden" value="some-id-value">
    <input type="submit" value="Cancel">
</form>

<form method="post" action="/confirmAction">
    <input name="id" type="hidden" value="some-id-value">
    <input type="submit" value="Confirm">
</form>

Or using MVC Razor syntax since you mentioned it:

@using (Html.BeginForm("cancelAction", "MyController", FormMethod.Post))
{
    @Html.HiddenFor(model => model.ID)
    <input type="submit" value="Cancel">
}

@using (Html.BeginForm("confirmAction", "MyController", FormMethod.Post))
{
    @Html.HiddenFor(model => model.ID)
    <input type="submit" value="Confirm">
}