CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsrubyajaxjquery
Yooku
Yooku

Reputation: 243

Rails Autosave form with jquery

I am working on application where a a user can create a blog post and the blog post periodically updates every so often. I found a jQuery autosave plugin for handling the autosave but I am still running into problems.

  1. When I debug using firebug I only see the GET request so therefore the page does not get updated and I am not sure how to call POST after the GET request.

  2. It does not update as I type or every 3 seconds but it updates when I click outside of a form field. Anyway to have it so it updates every 3 seconds or so?

My code is listed below

application.js

    jQuery(function($) {
      $("#main-form").autosave({
        callbacks: {
          trigger: ["change", function() {
            var self = this;

            $("[name=save]").click(function() {
              self.save();
            });
          }],
          save: {
            method: "ajax",
            options: {
              success: function() {
                alert("saved!");
              }
            }
          }
        }
      });
    });

post_controller.rb

def update
  @post = Post.find(params[:id])

  respond_to do |format|
    if @post.update_attributes(params[:post])
      format.html { redirect_to semester_post_path, notice: 'post was successfully updated.' }
      format.json { head :ok }
    else
      format.html { render action: "edit" }
      format.json { render json: @post.errors, status: :unprocessable_entity }
    end
  end
end

Upvotes: 3

Views: 2465

Answers (1)

rwheadon
rwheadon

Reputation: 241

I'm sure you've moved on, but just to close the gap on this post. OnChange takes place when a field loses focus, so what you're seeing seems to be functioning as designed and normal for that design.

Here's a link to question/answer using timeouts to autosave via AJAX.

Autosave Opinion:

I'm not sure you really want envoke autosave until the document has been formally submitted for several reasons but I'll post my favorite 2.

  1. Some forms tend to have a lot of moving parts for the back end storage and that first commit should be intentional before stuffing a bunch of data into tables. (IMHO)

  2. another rationale behind leaving them alone (not auto-saving) before the first "real" submit is because until they hit submit they might not really want you to have that information in your system.

How often have you started a form on the web and then decided you didn't want to fill out that information after all? ... it would frustrate me to get a flyer or email or call from a site I actually decided to bail out of registration for!

Upvotes: 2

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