c# - ASP.NET MVC Core/6: Multiple submit buttons

Question

I need multiple submit buttons to perform different actions in the controller.

I saw an elegant solution here: How do you handle multiple submit buttons in ASP.NET MVC Framework? With this solution, action methods can be decorated with a custom attribute. When the routes are processed a method of this custom attribute checks if the attribute's property matches the name of the clicked submit button.

But in MVC Core (RC2 nightly build) I have not found ActionNameSelectorAttribute (I also searched the Github repository). I found a similar solution which uses ActionMethodSelectorAttribute (http://www.dotnetcurry.com/aspnet-mvc/724/handle-multiple-submit-buttons-aspnet-mvc-action-methods).

ActionMethodSelectorAttribute is available but the method IsValidForRequest has a different signature. There is a parameter of type RouteContext. But I could not find the post data there. So I have nothing to compare with my custom attribute property.

Is there a similar elegant solution available in MVC Core like the ones in previous MVC versions?

Answer 1

You can use the HTML5 formaction attribute for this, instead of routing it server-side.

<form action="" method="post">
    <input type="submit" value="Option 1" formaction="DoWorkOne" />
    <input type="submit" value="Option 2" formaction="DoWorkTwo"/>
</form>

Then simply have controller actions like this:

[HttpPost]
public IActionResult DoWorkOne(TheModel model) { ... }

[HttpPost]
public IActionResult DoWorkTwo(TheModel model) { ... }

A good polyfill for older browsers can be found here.

Keep in mind that...

1. The first submit button will always be chosen when the user presses the carriage return.
2. If an error - ModelState or otherwise - occurs on the action that was posted too, it will need to send the user back to the correct view. (This is not an issue if you are posting through AJAX, though.)