<a><button></a> weirdness

[Mackski]

I recently had an issue with email being sent twice, although the code was only being executed once.
Turns out, the default method of wrapping a button in a <a> tag causes Firefox to abort the first request which subsequently fires off my email function, after which returning a 200 which fires it again.

As far as I know, IE may not like the wrapping of a button in an anchor (although this is un-tested)

Here is the offending code being used:

$href = $this->config->urls->admin.'page/edit/?id='.$this->input->get->id.'&email_client=true';
$field = $this->modules->get('InputfieldButton');
$field->attr('id+name', 'email_client');
$field->attr('class', $field->class);
$field->attr('value', 'Email Client');
$field->attr('href',$href);

The work around is to not wrap the button in an anchor, rather use javascript onclick.

$href = 'window.location.href="'.$this->config->urls->admin.'page/edit/?id='.$this->input->get->id.'&email_client=true"';
$field->attr('onclick',$href);

Hope this helps someone in the future.

[Pete]

You shouldn't wrap a <button> tag in an <a> tag anyway. An <a> is for linking some text, a button is to do something on a form. You shouldn't mix the two together and your workaround isn't required either.

Can you show us the rest of the form? There will almost certainly be a better way.

You should have some sort of form action with the URL you're using above for a start that's part of (presumably) a $form that you've got elsewhere in your code, and the button should submit against that rather than what you're doing.

[Mackski]

Hi Pete, however InputfieldButton.module indicates otherwise:

              public function ___render() {
		$href = $this->attr('href');
		if($href) $this->attr('href', '');
		$out = parent::___render();
		if($href) { 
		  $out = trim($out); 
		  $out = "<a href='$href'>$out</a>";
		  $this->attr('href', $href); 
		}
		
		return $out; 
	       }

This is the only reason I used the code in this way.

To explain further, I wanted to append some custom buttons, with custom actions in the page edit form.
Rather than create a new inputfield for a custom anchor, I just utilize the button.module.

As you state, it's not a role of the button to achieve this. Just wondering why it's part of the core?