ruby on rails autosave forms

I have a pretty extensive form on one of my rails sites and I was wondering if its possible to dynamically save the form for every onchange input. What I'm trying to prevent is users taking the time to fill the form out and then lose all their changes because of a connec开发者_如何转开发tivity issue or something stupid like that...

Any suggestions? Basically, I don't want the form to have to be submitted at all. I just want the form to save like a preference would in an Mac OS X (no apply or save button it just saves).

using rails 3...thanks!

The strain that would put on your server and DB would be several orders of magnitude higher than a more traditional approach. I also agree with Kyle that I would be very confused about the lack of submit button. At the very least, you'll need to notify users each time data is sent to the server and saved successfully, otherwise they'll have no idea why you aren't asking them to save.

Also, think about all the overhead. With every keystroke the user will have to initiate a connection, send their HTTP headers, cookies, the contents of the form, etc.

Have you considered an autosave feature instead? Maybe save the form every 2 minutes if changes have been made, and then put a submit button on the form as well? I think it would save you a great deal of pain, but get you almost the same benefit.

You could attach an ajax event to each input losing focus that would call the Controllers update method.

Most users would be surprised by this behavior though because it isn't the expected behavior of a web site.

If you use AJAX to call update, then here are a few things that might help: jQuery's serialize() function can help gather the form data into a post request without having to call the forms submit action. Using save(:validate => false) will bypass validation if you are saving drafts and want to skip validation until the final save.