jQuery .ajax() - adding extra parameters

I'm manually adding values to data, there must be a better way

[caribguy]

My app server's validation routine depends on the name/value pair of the submit button in order to process the request.

Below is what I'm doing now, and I think it's rather ugly. I'm also considering to add it as a hidden field, but can't believe there isn't a cleaner way...

<form id="registration_form" method="post" action="/register">
  <input type="text" name="first_name" >
  [..]
  <input type="submit" name="add_member" value="Register" >
</form>

The jQuery snippet looks like this:

$("#registration_form").submit( function(e) {
  e.preventDefault();
  var my_context = '#form-content'
  var default_data = '&add_member="Register"';
  $.ajax({
    url: $(this).attr('action'),
    type: $(this).attr('method'),
    dataType: "html", 
    data : $("#registration_form").serialize() + default_data ,
    context: $(my_context),
    success: function(data) {
      $(my_context, data).each( function () {
        $(my_context).replaceWith($(this));
      });
    }
  });
});

[Fotiman]

It looks like version 1.4.3 of jQuery added this format:

.submit( [ eventData ], handler(eventObject) )

So you could do something like this to pass along the id of the submit button:

$("#registration_form").submit( {btn: '#add_member'}, function(e) {
  e.preventDefault();
  alert($(e.data.btn).attr('id'));

So you could use that to get the name/value of the submit button. However, if you have multiple submit buttons, that wouldn't work (you wouldn't know which one was clicked). A possible alternatively might be to also attach a click listener to the submit buttons that simply records which button was clicked, and then access that data in your submit event handler.

[caribguy]

Thanks! Attaching a listener seems like a good option.

If my validation script does not receive the button value, it generates a default form rather than validating the data. Not sure why the people who designed this could not have used post/get to determine which function to execute...