Spring MVC Multiple submit buttons in a single form

Recently I came across a situation where in which I needed to have two submit buttons in a Single Spring MVC form and have separate action mapped to each of them. Previously we had been using the below approach in my application.

 <form action="dosomething">
     <input type='submit' name='action' value='action1' />
    <input type='submit' name='action' value='action2' />
 </form>

The controller part looks like

public class Controller
{
	public String doSomething()
	{
		String action= request.getParameter("action");
		if(action == "action1") 
		{
			dosomething
		}
		else if(action == "action2") 
		{
			do something else
		}
	}
}

Now here comes the question how to achieve the same in Spring MVC. We will have to use an attribute called as params in the @RequestMapping to get the value of the button
Spring MVC Form

<input type = "submit" name = "action1" />
<input type = "submit" name = "action2" />

Spring Controller

@RequestMapping(params = "action1")
public ModelAndView action1(...) 

@RequestMapping(params = "action2")
public ModelAndView action2(....)

Let’s look into the complete example

Folder Structure :

Create a Dynamic Web Project “SpringMVCMultipleSubmitButton” and create a package for our src files “com.javainterviewpoint“
Place the Spring 3 jar files under WEB-INF/Lib

commons-logging-1.1.1.jar
log4j-1.2.16.jar
slf4j-api-1.7.5.jar
slf4j-log4j12-1.7.5.jar
spring-aspects-3.2.4.RELEASE.jar
spring-beans-3.2.4.RELEASE.jar
spring-context-3.2.4.RELEASE.jar
spring-core-3.2.4.RELEASE.jar
spring-expression-3.2.4.RELEASE.jar
spring-web-3.2.4.RELEASE.jar
spring-webmvc-3.2.4.RELEASE.jar
Create the Java classes SpringMVCController.java under com.javainterviewpoint folder.
Place the SpringConfig-servlet.xml and web.xml under the WEB-INF directory
View files welcome.jsp are put under the sub directory under WEB-INF/Jsp

welcome.jsp

<%@ page language="java" contentType="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"
 pageEncoding="ISO-8859-1"%>
 <%@ taglib uri="http://www.springframework.org/tags/form" prefix="form" %>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<title>Insert title here</title>
</head>
<body>
   <form:form action="processForm" method="post">
     <input type = "submit" name = "action1" value="Action1"/>
     <input type = "submit" name = "action2" value="Action2"/> 
   </form:form>
</body>
</html>

our welcome page has nothing but two submit buttons with names assigned as “action1” and “action2”

SpringMVCController.java

import org.springframework.stereotype.Controller;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMethod;

@Controller
public class SpringMVCController 
{
    @RequestMapping("/showForm")
    public String showForm()
    {
        return "welcome";
    }
    @RequestMapping(value="/processForm",params="action1",method=RequestMethod.POST)
    public void action1()
    {
        System.out.println("Action1 block called");
    }
    @RequestMapping(value="/processForm",params="action2",method=RequestMethod.POST)
    public void action2()
    {
        System.out.println("Action2 block called");
    }
}

Our controller class has the RequestMapping corresponding to the action from the form “processForm” and param attribute which corresponds to the name of the each button. so when 1st button is clicked action1() method will be called and when 2nd button is clicked action2() method will be called.
web.xml

The web.xml has everything about the application that a server needs to know, which is placed under the WEB-INF directory. <servlet-name> contains the name of the SpringConfiguration , when the DispatcherServlet is initialized the framework will try to load a configuration file “[servlet-name]-servlet.xml” under the WEB-INF directory.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
	xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"	xmlns:web="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd"
	xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee	
	http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd"
	id="WebApp_ID" version="2.5">
	<display-name>SpringMVCFormHandling</display-name>
	<welcome-file-list>
		<welcome-file>index.html</welcome-file>
		<welcome-file>index.htm</welcome-file>
		<welcome-file>index.jsp</welcome-file>
		<welcome-file>default.html</welcome-file>
		<welcome-file>default.htm</welcome-file>
		<welcome-file>default.jsp</welcome-file>
	</welcome-file-list>
	<servlet>
		<servlet-name>SpringConfig</servlet-name>
		<servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
	</servlet>
	<servlet-mapping>
		<servlet-name>SpringConfig</servlet-name>
		<url-pattern>/</url-pattern>
	</servlet-mapping>
</web-app>

SpringConfig-servlet.xml

The SpringConfig-servlet.xml is also placed under the WEB-INF directory.

<context:component-scan> will let the Spring Container to search for all the annotation under the package “com.javainteriviewpoint”.
<mvc:annotation-driven/> annotation will activate the @Controller, @RequestMapping, @Valid etc annotations.
The view is resolved through “org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver” which searches for the jsp files under the /WEB-INF/Jsp/ directory.

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans" 
xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context" 
xmlns:mvc="http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc" 
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
xsi:schemaLocation=" http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans	
http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd	
http://www.springframework.org/schema/context	
http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.0.xsd	
http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc	
http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc/spring-mvc-3.0.xsd"> 
 
    <mvc:annotation-driven/>
 
    <context:component-scan base-package="com.javainterviewpoint"></context:component-scan>
 
    <bean id="viewResolver" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver">
        <property name="prefix" value="/WEB-INF/Jsp/"></property>
        <property name="suffix" value=".jsp"></property>
     </bean>
 </beans>

Output

URL : http://localhost:8080/SpringMVCMultipleSubmitButton/processForm

when 1st button is clicked,action1() method is called

Action1 block called

when 2nd button is clicked,action2() method is called

Action2 block called

Comments

Clayton says

August 21, 2015 at 5:40 pm

Thank you, it was helpfull!!!

kishore says

October 20, 2015 at 11:41 pm

Very helpful! Thanks

Jorge says

November 12, 2015 at 9:05 pm

Excellent. Quite simple, for brain-dead programmers llike me. Thank you very much!

vahid says

November 30, 2015 at 3:09 pm

Thanks buddy,it was helpful 🙂

raghava says

November 29, 2016 at 4:57 pm

very useful. thanks

ljuba says

November 17, 2017 at 2:13 am

Thank you very cool.

mista269 says

November 28, 2017 at 4:15 pm

Thank you for sharing this useful knowledge

Mehdi says

January 5, 2018 at 12:32 pm

Very Useful

Chakradhar says

February 10, 2018 at 5:50 pm

Thank you very much for sharing your good knowledge, if you do not post this, lot of time get wasted for me, it is useful

Spring MVC Multiple submit buttons in a single form

Folder Structure :

welcome.jsp

SpringMVCController.java

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Folder Structure :

welcome.jsp

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