A couple of years ago I wanted to add a donation button to an ASP.net website. Specifically I wanted a Paypal based donation button. It should have been really easy. Paypal will let you make buttons on their site and they’ll generate the code for you to put onto your own web page. But unfortunately… it’s just not really that easy.  I recently needed to do this again (just today actually) and couldn’t bring myself to use one of the old hacks I had done, and I finally found a super easy solution. I don’t understand why it was so hard to find this information, but I decided to write it up for all to see and use.

The problem is that the code that PayPal generate is html form code. The “action” of the form is a page on their website. The reason that this is a problem is because most people use masterpages within their ASP.net webpages and those masterpages typically have form tags already in them. Since webpages are only supposed to have one “form” per page then adding the PayPal generated form in the content area of a page that is wrapped within a form on the masterpage is just not going to work. What happens is that when the user clicks on the PayPal submit button it just posts back to local website instead of posting to PayPal. Very annoying.

I read about 20 web pages / tutorials today about how one can use PayPal generated buttons within an ASP.net, and I was about to finally give up and do it the old way when it occurred to me that maybe I could control the current page’s masterpage’s form’s action programatically. (By the way that was the most possessives in a row ever!)

So here’s the deal, and it is so easy. Let’s say that the PayPal code generated for you looks like:

<form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post">
 <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_s-xclick">
 <input type="hidden" name="hosted_button_id" value="blablablabla">
 <table>
 <tr><td><input type="hidden" name="on0" value="Subscription Level">Subscription Level</td></tr><tr><td><select name="os0">
 <option value="Pro">Pro $5.00 USD</option>
 <option value="Allstar">Allstar $15.00 USD</option>
 <option value="Superstar">Superstar $25.00 USD</option>
 </select> </td></tr>
 </table>
 <input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="USD">
 <input type="image" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_paynowCC_LG.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="PayPal - The safer, easier way to pay online!">
 <img alt="" border="0" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/scr/pixel.gif" width="1" height="1">
 </form>

Go ahead and paste the generated code into your page wherever it is you want it to go. You don’t have to jump through any hoops here. Now go to your codebehind and add a couple of lines to the “PageLoad” method for the page in question. Here’s a super simple PageLoad with the two new lines:

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
 {
 if (!IsPostBack) 
 {  } 
 else  {  } 
 Form.Action = "https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr";  
Form.Method = "post"; 
}

That’s it! What we did was we just programmatically set our Masterpage’s form’s action and method to whatever the PayPal form’s action / method was. So, now, when you click on the PayPal button your MasterPage form will still be the one that handles it, but it will handle it the exact same way that the PayPal form would have. Enjoy!

Please let me know how it works for you!