Django request.POST does not contain the name of the button that submitted the form

Question

I have a django form with two different submit buttons, on the view where the form is submitted to I need to know what submit button was pressed and take different actions accordingly.

From what I have read the submit button's name or id should be somewhere in the request.POST dictionary, but it not there!

This is a fragment of my form:

<form id="editPaperForm" action="{{paper.editURL}}" method="POST">
   <input type="submit" name="savePaperButton" id="savePaperButton" value="Save and Send Later"/>
   <input type="submit" name="sendPaperButton" id="sendPaperButton" value="Save and send"/>

   ...

</form>

In the view:

...
if 'sendPaperButton' in request.POST:
   return applicants_confirmSend(request, paperID)
else:
   return applicants_home(request)

sendPaperButton is never in the request.POST, and neither is the other one, should I be looking somewhere else?

The only idea I have is to add a hidden field and modify it via javascript before sending the form but that seems kind of redundant since I'm pretty sure that data should be there somewhere...

Thanks!

Answer 1

Don't forget to add the name and value parameters to your "button" or "input type=submit" fields of the form. I've had the same problem once and it drove me crazy.

In short, as request.POST contains a dict, you need a key and a value. The key corresponds to the name parameter of your button, and the dict's value to the button's value.

<button type="submit" value="preview">Preview</button>

won't be reflected in request.POST (there's no key for the POST dictionary!), whereas

<button type="submit" value="preview" name="preview">Preview</button> 

will have a key "preview" with value "preview".