Using the POST Method with HTML Anchor Tags

Question

I am certain the answer will be 'NO', but I wanted to ask anyway just incase I have missed something.

Everyone knows that one pass data to a page in an anchor tag by using the GET method:

What I am wondering is if there was a way to do the same thing, but use the POST Method instead?

My purpose in doing so is to keep the URLs the user sees clean by not putting anything in them that they do not need to see.

This has nothing to do with security concerns as I already know there would be ways to obtain the data being passed.

If the answer is indeed no, then what methods do people use to pass data when there is a desire to keep the URLs clean? Cookies? Something else?

and how to deal with the scenarios when the URL length exceeds the permissible GET request length

I am facing this issue while implementing sorting/pagination with displaytag, all the request parameters are appending in the sort/pagination url which is more then the permissible length of the GET request.

Answer 1

You could do something like this:

<form id="myform" method="post" action="target.html">
  <input type="hidden" name="name" value="value" /> 
  <a onclick="document.getElementById('myform').submit();">click here</a>
</form>

Answer 2

This behaviour is specific to display tag library. It allows for easily bookmarkable search results. If you really intend to change this to make use of POST, then you'd need to rewrite the display tag library or bring in some jQuery to manipulate the links.

The remnant of your questions boils nowhere. If you want GET (idempotent requests, bookmarkable URLs, searchbot-crawable URLs, etc), then use GET. If you want POST (non-idempotent requests, non-bookmarkable URLs, non-crawlable URLs, etc), then use POST.

Usually, POST is mandatory when the request can modify the data in the server. Think of a SQL INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, etc. You certainly won't make this kind of requests GET. Imagine that you've a table with all "delete row" links which do GET and then a searchbot comes along...

Answer 3

You can use javascript. On onclick of link do form.submit

The only way I know of to deal with lenghty URL is to instead use POST.

Answer 4

You may create a temporary form and submit it while onclick event of <a> tag.