Asp.Net MVC – handling multiple submit from a view

In Asp.Net MVC, after understanding of how controller communicates with Views, the biggest challenge i found was to handle multiple form submit requests. Almost every view will have multiple buttons to post/submit data (ideally a ViewModel) to controller. In this post I am assuming that you are comfortable with very basics of MVC.

To do this sample just create a Asp.Net MVC web application project and write the code in “Views/Index.cshtml” at the end because by default this is the landing page of default website template.

This code is just a sample which may not be practical in real world scenario.

@using (Html.BeginForm("MyCommonSubmitAction", "Home", FormMethod.Post)) {

<input type ="text" id="txtComments"  /> <br />

<input type="submit" name="approve" id="btnApprove" value="Approve"/>
<input type="submit" name="reject" id="btnReject" value="Reject" />
}

Now, Let us see the controller action method how it will differentiate these two submits.

[HttpPost]
public ActionResult MyCommonSubmitAction(FormCollection frm)
{
var button = frm["approve"] ?? frm["reject"];
//var comments  =  frm["txtComments"]; assuming view is not strongly typed
switch (button )
{
case "Approve" :
// do your thing
break;

case "Reject"  :
// do your thing
break;

default:
return View("Index");
}

return View("Index");

}

Now, this is just one of the ways you can differentiate multiple submit requests. Important thing to notice here is that FormCollection
is bound to the post request and is available as a parameter which actually holds all the form fields posted to the controller. Ideally every view should be bound to a strongly type ViewModel.

There are better ways of binding your data model to your view. Those who are new to Asp.Net MVC. I would recommend you to read Scott Gu post on model binding.