Comments on: GET+POST in same form?

Question: GET+POST in same form?

Blazecock Pileon — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 09:02:17 -0800

Is it possible to set the action attribute of an HTML form, such that the method is POST, but the action includes GET variables?

For example, I'd like the following code:

<form name="edit_name" action=".?debug" method="post">

<input type="submit" value="Edit">

</form>

to return GET value containing debug and a POST value containing Edit.

Is this reasonable or possible?

By: Aidan Kehoe

Aidan Kehoe — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 09:10:06 -0800

It's possible, sure. That syntax won't work, though; you'll need to give the path to the page, which probably isn't a single dot.

If you're using something proprietary as a server-side language, they may not have support for it, because it's not really idiomatic. PHP and Perl certainly do, and I would be shocked if Ruby and Python didn't. But that wasn't your question :-) .

By: Blazecock Pileon

Blazecock Pileon — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 09:13:25 -0800

Doesn't seem to work, even with a fully-specified path in the action. Only the GET variable gets through; POST is empty. I'm using PHP.

By: matthewr

matthewr — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 09:20:33 -0800

Yeah, the HTML you posted isn't quite right.

Try this:

<form name="edit_name" action="this.php?debug" method="post">
<input type="submit" name="myfield" value="Edit">
</form>

The problem was your input button didn't have a name attribute. Now, after clicking edit, your PHP $_GET superglobal should contain the 'debug' field, with no value, and $_POST will contain the 'myfield' field, with value 'Edit'.

By: Blazecock Pileon

Blazecock Pileon — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 09:24:02 -0800

I'm a dummy; thanks so much.

By: ook

ook — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 09:26:43 -0800

Out of curiosity, why would you want to mix GET and POST? Wouldn't it be easier (and less hacky) to just use POST for all the variables?

<input type="hidden" name="debug" value="whatever">

By: Blazecock Pileon

Blazecock Pileon — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 09:47:40 -0800

I'd like to be able to debug variables "on the fly" as I write methods, whether or not I've triggered a form.

By: IshmaelGraves

IshmaelGraves — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 11:06:09 -0800

That syntax won't work, though; you'll need to give the path to the page, which probably isn't a single dot.

You can also get away with just ?foo=bar bit:

<form name="edit_name" action="?debug" method="post">

The browser (well, Firefox and IE, at least) will construct the URI appropriately, saving you a little URL munging.

By: cyrusdogstar

cyrusdogstar — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 14:44:02 -0800

FWIW you can also do "./?blahblahblah" if you want to be both explicit ("I want to access the same URL/resource that I'm currently at") and terse.