Autosaving forms reliably - timer?

[SiD the Turtle]

I'm currently building a PHP powered web form. The user is required to enter quite a fair amount of data so they need some sort of office style autosave while they work which would dump their info into SQL in case the browser crashes or they close it or whatever.

I was thinking of using a javascript timer, but from other non-web projects in the past I've always been told to avoid timers, as they are often not reliable. Now I don't need to measure down the millisecond but do you reckon that a javascript timer would be okay to say, save after ten minutes on the form?

If not, what else would you suggest?

 

[toastyman]

Why not break down the one form into several different pages, and save the user's data to a php session after they have completed each page?

If it is a large form, it would probably be best to break it down into smaller chunks, so this would be an ideal solution

 

[SiD the Turtle]

Why not break down the one form into several different pages, and save the user's data to a php session after they have completed each page?

If it is a large form, it would probably be best to break it down into smaller chunks, so this would be an ideal solution

Good idea in theory but I can't. The majoriy of the form time will be devoted to a text box that needs a lot of data in it so it can't be split, and one of the key requirements is to have one simple form.

 

[Augmented]

I've used AJAX requests to do something similar to this in the past. Though I didn't complete the project I implemented it in, so I haven't actually tested its reliability in the wild. Seemed to work fine in testing.

For a CMS-style application, I monitored keypress events in the textarea input box and periodically e.g. when there's a pause after keypresses, I would send all the form data using XMLHttpRequest to a script that would store it all in a session object (in my case, the session store was a DB, but I'm sure you could use regular sessions). I also offered a save button that performed the same functionality i.e. the save occured in the background, and didn't refresh the page.

Things to consider are the load caused by the constant server hammering, if you're autosaving frequently, and ensuring the reliability of the data saved.

Using the AJAX request, you could also visually update the page with notification of an autosave, and provide info such as 'last saved 3 minutes ago'.

Still, the entire form was spilt over several screens to avoid information overload and simplify the process of entering data.

 

[Beansprout]

There's always risk if you have One Large Textbox...what if the user accidentally deletes everything and that then goes through and is saved? They still have to re-type

Best thing is to ask your users to take care, or to use a text editor to write the Big Part, or copy the contents to the clipboard - as well as the autosave...perhaps with some protection for length changes

 

[SiD the Turtle]

There's always risk if you have One Large Textbox...what if the user accidentally deletes everything and that then goes through and is saved? They still have to re-type

Best thing is to ask your users to take care, or to use a text editor to write the Big Part, or copy the contents to the clipboard - as well as the autosave...perhaps with some protection for length changes

Yeah I know its crazy but this is a wacky internal corporate project and they are very picky on what they want, despite what we tell them!

All of your suggestions on writing it externally and pasting it in would be what I would do, but we have to assume next to no IT literacy. Fun stuff

 

[Augmented]

There's always risk if you have One Large Textbox...what if the user accidentally deletes everything and that then goes through and is saved? They still have to re-type

It might be quite a neat idea, if it's just saving a single textarea, to save several revisions in session. Then the user can rollback if they screw up. Or simply don't autosave if the textarea is empty.