I was recently confronted with the problem of having a single html form with three different submit buttons, each button submitting the form data to a different php script. This is obviously impossible with html alone, as a form can only have one 'action' attribute, which dictates the URL of the file that the form's data is submitted to.

I searched around on the web for an easy way to implement this and found various examples. One of the best examples I found was on CoderLab's blog: Multiple submit buttons on a multiple blog which uses javascript to apply a different action attribute to the form depending on which button is pressed. Each button in the form has it's own onClick function like so:

<form name="myForm" id="myForm">
Search: <input type="text" id="wrdSearch"/>
<input type="button" name="google" id="google" value="Google" onClick="SendTo(this.id)"/>
<input type="button" name="msn" id="msn" value="MSN" onClick="SendTo(this.id)"/>
<input type="button" name="yahoo" id="yahoo" value="Yahoo" onClick="SendTo(this.id)"/>
</form>

(Visit the page to see the javascript that goes with it: http://blog.coderlab.us/2005/10/04/multiple-submit-buttons-in-a-form/)

As I already had jQuery installed on the site, and the CoderLab script would still need some modification to serve my specific purpose, I decided to see if I could find a simpler way to achieve a similar result using jQuery. The form on my site was a lot more complex, with many fields etc. So what I really needed was a script that would submit all the form data to each of the 3 php scripts depending on which submit button was clicked.

Firstly, I stripped the onClick functions out of the form and removed the name attributes from the buttons too, like so:

<form id="myForm" method="post">
Search: <input type="text" name="search"/>
<input type="button" id="button1" value="Submit to script 1" />
<input type="button" id="button2" value="Submit to script 2" />
<input type="button" id="button3" value="Submit to script 3" />
</form>

I then wrote the following jQuery script to change the form's action attribute accordingly and submit it when each button is pressed:

$(document).ready(function(){

$("#button1").click(function(){
$('form#myForm').attr({action: "script_1.php"});
$('form#myForm').submit();
});

$("#button2").click(function(){
$('form#myForm').attr({action: "script_2.php"});
$('form#myForm').submit();
});

$("#button3").click(function(){
$('form#myForm').attr({action: "script_3.php"});
$('form#myForm').submit();
});

});

The script should work on any browser that is compatible with jQuery (see here: http://docs.jquery.com/Browser_Compatibility)

For more information on installing and using jQuery visit the website: http://jquery.com/