Forum: Ruby on Rails How detect image button clicks?

I have a form submitted using remote_form_tag. I have two image
buttons in this form.

In other languages, I have been able to detect which button was
clicked by checking for a GET or POST parameter of the button name
with a .x after it (such as buttonName.x = 13)

In the params I am getting from my form in Rails, I get hash entries
for all button names with no .x or .y extensions and no other
indicator as to which button was clicked.

The output of essentially doing debug(params) simply shows
    btnSearch: ""
    btnClear: ""

What is Rails' solution to this? It seems to be eliminating rather
useful (and commonly used) info.

-- gw

On 21 Apr 2008, at 19:29, Greg Willits wrote:

> indicator as to which button was clicked.
>
> The output of essentially doing debug(params) simply shows
>    btnSearch: ""
>    btnClear: ""

I was surprised by this so I gave it a go. It worked  as you would
expect with a regular form, but not with the form_remote_tag. The big
difference is of course that in the second case the form is serialized
by prototype rather than the browser, and prototype obviously doesn't
know how to get the click location. Whether this is an omission or a
genuinely hard thing to do I don't know.
>

Fred

On Apr 21, 2008, at 11:40 AM, Frederick Cheung wrote:
>>    btnSearch: ""
>>    btnClear: ""
>
> I was surprised by this so I gave it a go. It worked  as you would
> expect with a regular form, but not with the form_remote_tag. The big
> difference is of course that in the second case the form is serialized
> by prototype rather than the browser, and prototype obviously doesn't
> know how to get the click location. Whether this is an omission or a
> genuinely hard thing to do I don't know.


OK, well, at least I know it's not me. And maybe it explains another
problem I am having with the same form which I don't seem to have
with a non-Ajax form.

Hrmmm. So much for Ajaxifying this app (UI depends heavily on
differentiating image buttons).

Thanks for the verification.

-- gw

On 21 Apr 2008, at 20:23, Greg Willits wrote:

>>>
>> genuinely hard thing to do I don't know.
>
I hacked together a quick experiment: add an onclick to the form that
does
<script>
   function clicker(form, event){
     offsets = event.element().cumulativeOffset();
     x = event.pointerX() - offsets[0]
     y = event.pointerY() - offsets[1]
     params = Object.extend(Form.serialize(form, {hash: true}), {x: x,
y: y})
     new Ajax.Updater('to_update', '/dummy', {asynchronous:true,
evalScripts:true, parameters:params, method: 'get'}); return false;
   }
</script>
<% form_tag({},{:onclick => 'clicker(this, event); return false'}) do %>
..


Seems to be a start. (of course you'd have to add stuff to check that
the click was on an image element and should trigger a submit etc...

Fred