How to call a method with a button in Freemarker DropWizard

Question

I'm trying to call a delete method with a button in a Freemarker template. I thought it would be as simple as defining a path for that method in my resource class, and then pointing the action of the form to that path; however, nothing happens when I press the button.

Here is the code for the button:

<form action="http://localhost:8080/person/delete/${person.id}">
<input type="button" value="Delete"></form>

In theory, this is supposed to activate a method that sends a delete request to the SQL server. The original method I used for this is:

@DELETE
@Path("/delete/{id}")
public void deletePerson(@PathParam("id") int id) {
    manager.deletePerson(id);
}

This uses the DAO to send the request. I tested this in Postman and it works. I thought that I could just point the button down the same path to use it, but that did not work. So instead, I tried modifying the method to be used by the constructor for the ftl template:

@DELETE
@Path("/delete/{id}")
public PersonView deletePerson(@PathParam("id") int id) {
    return new PersonView(manager.deletePerson(id));
}

But this runs into the issue that I can't apply PersonView, which returns a list of persons, to deletePerson, which is a void method. Does anyone have any insight on how I can do this? It looks like it should be simple, but I can't figure it out.

Edit:

In addition to user7294900 answer regarding the submit button, I also needed to make a change regarding the delete method. In researching the issue, I also found that html forms cannot work with DELETE or PUT methods; only POST and GET. With this in mind, I changed the resource method to use @POST annotation:

@POST
@Path("/delete/{id}")
public void deletePerson(@PathParam("id") int id) {
    manager.deletePerson(id);
}

I also made the necessary submit change to the form button:

<form method="post" action="http://localhost:8080/person/delete/${profile.id}">
<input type="submit" value="Delete"></form>

Answer 1

It seems that your issue is HTML input type which should be submit type in order to submit your form

elements of type "submit" are rendered as buttons. When the click event occurs (typically because the user clicked the button), the user agent attempts to submit the form to the server

So change your button to:

 <input type="submit" value="Delete"></form></td>