how to pass params using action button in grails - grails

Question

been having toruble with the button that has action. I have several btns which I want to know its paramaeter. In grails tutorial it says it should be like this:
<g:actionSubmit action="action" value="${message(code: 'default.button.edit.label', default: 'Edit')}" params="['actionTaken':editPhone]"/>
I tried using remotelink, submitButton, submitToRemote tags but none works. I always get null when I try parsing it in my controller:
def action=
{
def actionTaken = params.actionTaken
def employeeId= params.employeeId
MySession session = MySession.getMySession(request, params.employeeId)
profileInstance = session.profileInstance
switch(actionTaken)
{
case "editPhone" :
isEditPhone=true
break
case "editEmail" :
isEditEmail=true
break
}
render(view:"profile", model:[profileInstance:session.profileInstance, isEditPhone:isEditPhone, isEditEmail:isEditEmail])
}
What am I missing? is my params code wrong? Is my code in parsing params wrong? this just gets me in circles with no progress. help. thanks.

Answer 1

The Grails documentation doesn't list params as one of the attributes accepted by actionSubmit.
It is possible to inject the value you want in your params list in the controller by exploiting what that tag actually does:
def editPhone = { forward(action:'action', params:[actionTaken: 'editPhone'])}
def editEmail = { forward(action:'action', params:[actionTaken: 'editEmail'])}
You may also just want to just code completely separate logic into the editPhone and editEmail actions if that makes your code cleaner.
Updated View Code:
<g:actionSubmit action="editPhone" value="${message(code: 'default.button.edit.label', default: 'Edit')}" />

Answer 2

The params attribute is parsed as a map, where the keys are treated a strings but the values are treated as expressions. Therefore
params="['actionTaken':editPhone]"
is trying to define the key named actionTaken to have the value from the variable named editPhone in the GSP model. Since there is no such variable you're getting null. So the fix is to move the quotes:
params="[actionTaken:'editPhone']"
which will set the value to the string "editPhone".

Answer 3

You could also pass the parameter inside the POST-data using
<input type="hidden" name="actionTaken" value="editPhone" />
inside the form. Then it is also accessible through the params variable.
It works for me.

Answer 4

I just had a similar problem (I needed to submit a delete together with an id) and found a solution using HTML5's "formaction" attribute for submit-inputs.
They can be given a value that can include a controller, action, additional parameters, etc.
In General, to add a parameter to a submit button such as a edit of a specific sub-object on a form would looks like this:
<input type="submit" formaction="/<controller>/<action>/<id>?additionalParam1=...&additionalParam2=..." value="Action" >
and in your example:
<input type="submit" formaction="action?actionTaken=editPhone" value="${message(code: 'default.button.edit.label', default: 'Edit')}" >

Answer 5

In my situation, I had a single form element with multiple actions on each row of a table (i.e. data table edit buttons). It was important to send the entire form data so I couldn't just use links. The quickest way I found to inject a parameter was with javascript. Not ideal, but it works:
function injectHiddenField(name, value) {
var control = $("input[type=hidden][name='" + name + "']");
if (control.size() == 0) {
console.log(name + " not found; adding...");
control = $("<input type=\"hidden\" id=\"" + name + "\" name=\"" + name + "\">");
$("form").append(control);
}
control.val(value);
}
Your button can look like this:
<g:each in="${objects}" var="object">
...
<g:actionSubmit value="edit" action="anotherAction"
onclick="injectHiddenField('myfield', ${object.id})"/>
</g:each>