How do you overcome the HTML form nesting limitation?

Question

I know that XHTML doesn't support nested form tags and I have already read other answers here on Stack Overflow regarding this subject, but I still haven't figured out an elegant solution to the problem.

Some say you don't need it and that they can't think of a scenario were this would be needed. Well, personally I can't think of a scenario that I haven't needed it.

Let's see a very simple example:

You are making a blog app and you have a form with some fields for creating a new post and a toolbar with "actions" like "Save", "Delete", "Cancel".

<form
 action="/post/dispatch/too_bad_the_action_url_is_in_the_form_tag_even_though_conceptually_every_submit_button_inside_it_may_need_to_post_to_a_diffent_distinct_url"
method="post">

    <input type="text" name="foo" /> <!-- several of those here -->
    <div id="toolbar">
        <input type="submit" name="save" value="Save" />
        <input type="submit" name="delete" value="Delete" />
        <a href="/home/index">Cancel</a>
    </div>
</form>

Our objective is to write the form in a way that doesn't require JavaScript, just plain old HTML form and submit buttons.

Since the action URL is defined in the Form tag and not in each individual submit button, our only option is to post to a generic URL and then start "if...then...else" to determine the name of the button that was submitted. Not very elegant, but our only choice, since we don't want to rely on JavaScript.

The only problem is that pressing "Delete", will submit ALL the form fields on the server even though the only thing needed for this action is a Hidden input with the post-id. Not very big deal in this small example, but I have forms with hundreds (so to speak) of fields and tabs in my LOB applications that (because of requirements) have to submit everything in one-go and in any case this seems very inefficient and a waste. If form nesting was supported, I would at least be able to wrap the "Delete" submit button inside it's own form with only the post-id field.

You may say "Just implement the "Delete" as a link instead of submit". This would be wrong in so many levels, but most importantly because Side-effect actions like "Delete" here, should never be a GET request.

So my question (particularly to those that say they haven't needed form nesting) is What do YOU do? Is there any elegant solution that I'm missing or the bottom line is really "Either require JavaScript or submit everything"?

Answer 1

I know this is an old question, but HTML5 offers a couple new options.

The first is to separate the form from the toolbar in the markup, add another form for the delete action, and associate the buttons in the toolbar with their respective forms using the form attribute.

<form id="saveForm" action="/post/dispatch/save" method="post">
    <input type="text" name="foo" /> <!-- several of those here -->  
</form>
<form id="deleteForm" action="/post/dispatch/delete" method="post">
    <input type="hidden" value="some_id" />
</form>
<div id="toolbar">
    <input type="submit" name="save" value="Save" form="saveForm" />
    <input type="submit" name="delete" value="Delete" form="deleteForm" />
    <a href="/home/index">Cancel</a>
</div>

This option is quite flexible, but the original post also mentioned that it may be necessary to perform different actions with a single form. HTML5 comes to the rescue, again. You can use the formaction attribute on submit buttons, so different buttons in the same form can submit to different URLs. This example just adds a clone method to the toolbar outside the form, but it would work the same nested in the form.

<div id="toolbar">
    <input type="submit" name="clone" value="Clone" form="saveForm"
           formaction="/post/dispatch/clone" />
</div>

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#attributes-for-form-submission

The advantage of these new features is that they do all this declaratively without JavaScript. The disadvantage is that they are not supported on older browsers, so you'd have to do some polyfilling for older browsers.