Using multiple forms or multiple submit buttons, what's the difference?

Basically, what pros/cons are there to using multiple forms in the same web page vs one form with multi开发者_如何学Pythonple submit buttons? Any difference at?

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Ah? Multiple submit buttons on a single form will all submit the entire form when pressed... there's really no advantage to having multiples, unless you're overriding how the submit process works so each button only submits it's own area. In this case they'd probably not even by submit buttons, but just buttons with sum JS code to handle submission.

Multiple forms are discrete spaces of data collection, each can have it's own submit button... but only one of them can be sent at a time (and depending on the browser you may loose what's in the other forms).

Neither approach is particularly good from a user interface perspective since it'll be confusing.

The real question is, what are you trying to do that prompts you to ask this?

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The two behave differently and there are good reasons to choose one over the other.

• Multiple Forms on a page allow you to send data to two different locations. A common example is to have an input form as the main focus of a page going to one location, and a search form that appears as part of the generic header/footer. These both go to separate locations and submit only the HTML form elements within their appropriate <form/>

• Multiple submit buttons offer you the ability to give different purpose to a submitted set of form elements. E.g. One form may have a bunch of submit buttons all with name attributes, meaning you can add conditional logic on the server side to say: "Continue", go " Back" or even "Save for later". All reference only the form elements within it's parent tag.

Two side notes are: 1) You can't nest forms. 2) JavaScript can change this default behaviour if you wanted it to. :)

Edit: with reference to a comment you made, if you wanted to do without JavaScript (a wise choice while it's not needed), you could do some careful thinking and keep POSTing the form to itself. Each time checking which form button has been clicked (top tip, give them all the same name and you can just switch case through it) and do whatever you need to do, including performing validation. E.g: When they hit "add media", you'd save the media uploaded and return a reference of it to the screen as a hidden input. The user can then continue to add things to the other boxes and when complete, hit your save button, at which point you do all the main saving work and make sure you tie the uploaded file to it as well. You effectively keep adding stuff to their screen until they hit the save and then you perform a save method and redirect to a thank you page (or whatever logic suits your scenario). :)

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All fields in a form are sent when one of their submit button is clicked. It's for you to see if you need all fields or not.