aspx: a form is always forwarded to the same page

Question

on the page products.aspx i created a form:

<form id="send_info_form" method="post" action="send_email.aspx">
<input type="text" name="the_name />
<input type="submit" />
</form>

when i click on submit it's forwarded to the same page (products.aspx) and not to the page i set in action attribute of the form.

Answer 1

In ASP.NET, the tag will by default always post itself to the same page. This allows you to handle any events in the codebehind in the ASPX page. It's not clear from your question what exactly you're trying to do. I can think of three possible scenarios:

1) You want to post back to the same page, and toggle visibility of UI elements (other panels, etc.) based on the result of the processing, or redirect the user to a second destination page once processing is complete. This is the most common scenario and the approach I recommend be taken, because it keeps all the logic regarding the processing of the form in one place.

2) You can specify a PostBackUrl to specify another (ASP.NET) page for button controls and whatnot. From there you can do the processing from elements on the first page on the second page using the PreviousPage property. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178139.aspx for more information.

3) If you have a separate page you wish to post to that you don't control that's not ASP.NET-based (i.e., another site's form, or a PHP/ASP3.0 site you run), things get significantly more difficult. ASP.NET puts everything in one giant elements. Since tags cannot reliably be embedded within each other in HTML, you will either have to do a silent POST manually from your codebehind, or use Javascript to quietly submit an ajax request upon submission.

Answer 2

It looks like you have a misunderstanding about how ASP.NET's logic works- ASP.NET has a much different paradigm than PHP or ASP does.

It seems like you're taking more of an ASP classic or PHP approach of directly handling the landing pages of forms and POST values, which you no longer have to do. You shouldn't need a separate page to handle the logic of the form submission either; this is all handled by event handlers in the submitting page's codebehind.

Instead of handling input elements directly, you should use ASP.NET's server controls to handle all the inputs for you.

What you should be doing is:

In the Products.aspx page:

E-mail Address: <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtEmail" />
<asp:Button runat="server" ID="btnSubmit" OnClick="btnSubmit_Click" Text="Submit" />

Note that there's no form tag required (besides the one already provided to you when you first make the ASPX page.

Since you're working with an object-oriented language with a business objects representing all of your HTML elements with ASP.NET, you don't have to handle reading from the POST values of the form directly.

In the codebehind for Products.aspx (I'm assuming C#, so Products.aspx.cs), add a method for btnSubmit_Click:

protected void btnSubmit_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) {
    string sendEmailTo = txtEmail.Text;
    // insert mail sending logic here
}