Clicking a button within a form causes page refresh

Question

If you have a look at the W3C specification, it would seem like the obvious thing to try is to mark your button elements with type='button' when you don't want them to submit.

The thing to note in particular is where it says

A button element with no type attribute specified represents the same thing as a button element with its type attribute set to "submit"

You can try to prevent default handler:

html:

<button ng-click="saveUser($event)">

js:

$scope.saveUser = function (event) {
  event.preventDefault();
  // your code
}

You should declare the attribute ng-submit={expression} in your <form> tag.

From the ngSubmit docs http://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng.directive:ngSubmit

Enables binding angular expressions to onsubmit events.

Additionally it prevents the default action (which for form means sending the request to the server and reloading the current page).

I use directive to prevent default behaviour:

module.directive('preventDefault', function() {
    return function(scope, element, attrs) {
        angular.element(element).bind('click', function(event) {
            event.preventDefault();
            event.stopPropagation();
        });
    }
});

And then, in html:

<button class="secondaryButton" prevent-default>Secondary action</button>

This directive can also be used with <a> and all other tags

You can keep <button type="submit">, but must remove the attribute action="" of <form>.