Html – Submit form using a button outside the

tag

You should keep the select element disabled but also add another hidden input with the same name and value.

If you reenable your SELECT, you should copy its value to the hidden input in an onchange event and disable (or remove) the hidden input.

Here is a demo:

$('#mainform').submit(function() {
    $('#formdata_container').show();
    $('#formdata').html($(this).serialize());
    return false;
});

$('#enableselect').click(function() {
    $('#mainform input[name=animal]')
        .attr("disabled", true);
    
    $('#animal-select')
        .attr('disabled', false)
    	.attr('name', 'animal');
    
    $('#enableselect').hide();
    return false;
});

#formdata_container {
    padding: 10px;
}

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<div>
    <form id="mainform">
        <select id="animal-select" disabled="true">
            <option value="cat" selected>Cat</option>
            <option value="dog">Dog</option>
            <option value="hamster">Hamster</option>
        </select>
        <input type="hidden" name="animal" value="cat"/>
        <button id="enableselect">Enable</button>
        
        <select name="color">
            <option value="blue" selected>Blue</option>
            <option value="green">Green</option>
            <option value="red">Red</option>
        </select>

        <input type="submit"/>
    </form>
</div>

<div id="formdata_container" style="display:none">
    <div>Submitted data:</div>
    <div id="formdata">
    </div>
</div>

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.