Ajax for autosave stuff

[Raz316]

So I've been doing a bit of reading on AJAX and on the most part 'they' seem to be going on about retrieving data from elsewhere, but I'm wondering, could it be used to save a form that's being filled in every, lets say, 5 minutes? (much like the google mail draft thingy)

This is probably the biggest issue our user base has with our current intranet system as they usually have to fill out long reports. Obviously I've suggested that they manually click the 'submit' button every now and then, but that basically doesn't happen.

Anyone got any first hand experience of this type of thing? Or maybe something I could read up on?
Cheers
-Chris

[moogle]

what do you mean save a form raz? got an example to help me understand?

[Raz316]

Sorry, should have been more clear. I meant, saving the contents of a html form as its being filled in by the user (textareas and inputs). Much like the autosave functions in office.

[moogle]

yes thats possible. You could have ajax call a php script to save the contents of each field into a cookie for you. and if needs be it could read the cookie and refill the fields again. is it like incase the user inputs something wrong and submits and when u go back all the fields are empty?

[stytagm]

Are you basically trying to keep the session alive too? (Squirrel mail can be guilty of this, if you spend more than 20 mins writing an email, your session has expired, so when you hit send, it's canned

So javascript to simply keep the session alive would be half way there. Ajax to save the half written email would be even better. Good idea.

Does Jquery have anything useful that might help you?

[Raz316]

cheers you two, I think the issues various people have been having is with the session timing out. So something that prods the session while they are working would be good.

As for the storing of data within a cookie I've just been mucking around with a greasemonkey script that claims to do this and while it currently doesnt work the whole time, it does seem like it could do the job too!

[TheAnimus]

Generally speaking you don't want to store too much data in a cookie.

What language is the app your using written in?

Doing something like this in Ruby on Rails, or MonoRail or MS MVC is a peice of p*ss.

(heck even in WebForms its easy).

[moogle]

no problems raz.

thanks for that jquery stuff stytagm it's very interesting.