Saving input/textbox without submit button on stopped typing - javascript

Just seeing if there's any best practice stuff on saving text inputs without a submit button. I've got this working fine with a delay when input is stopped using Jquery (on MVC site Ajax to Controller) but this still keeps posting data when a user waits to continue typing etc.
I'd ideally like a way of determining that a user has finished updating text within a textbox/text field without the need for a physical save button.
Is there a client side library/function I can use or even cache with writes on the server side & then write to db after a delay?

It depends on how you are determining the user has finished updating the text. Since you don't want to post data after delay then, I guess, the only way here is to check when the user changes focus from the text input field. In that case you can use onfocusout event.
<input type="text" onfocusout="postData(value)" />

Related

Handling multiple HTML submit button presses from form in WordPress

So I’m running a WordPress site and it has a form I have made using HTML with a text field, an email field, a password field, and a submit button.
The problem is that users can spam the submit button, and users are occasionally prone to do that as I’m using AJAX to handle the form submission which can take a while.
Any elegant solutions would be good. I have a few suggestions I think could work but I’m not sure how to implement them, if they will actually work, or if they’re even viable.
First possibility I’m thinking of — when WordPress loads a new page, it often has the swirly loading screen with a grey background. could I have the loading screen come on prematurely, as in at the point when I run any AJAX code, too, rather than just when it changes page?
Second possibility I’m thinking of — is there a way to block all of the form fields and the submit button from being pressed as soon as you click it so it cannot be spammed and fields cannot be changed? Could this work via JavaScript (sorry not the best with JS)?
Third possibility I’m thinking of — is there a way that the system only accepts one form from an IP in the space of 5-10 seconds and any other submissions of a POST request in that cooldown time are ignored?
Would any of the above solutions work or be viable enough to work? If so, how would or could they work? I’m thinking the second one is probably the easiest to implement? However, wouldn’t the first one confirm to the user that we’re processing their data so it’d be better for the UX?
Fourth possibility that considers UX and the solution I feel is more practical — is there a way to block the submit buttons and input fields from being pressed or edited once the submit button has been pressed once, and then have a swirly loading bar appear below or above it (maybe via CSS and HTML?) so users know the site is doing something or loading?
Something just to note — the change must be client side only and the change should not affect the user if they come back to the page in future, meaning it should not remain blocked if they refresh the page or come back to it later. I know it’s implied, but wanted just to specify that.
Since you're doing this as an AJAX request, i imagine you currently have some javascript tied to the onsubmit event. Most likely this function of yours encodes the data to JSON and then sends it to the server using ajax.
One way you could accomplish this, is:
Introduce a new variable in the global scope (so outside of the onsubmit-handler); like var submission_cache = ''; or the like.
Next, inside your onsubmit handler, between the stage where you have 'encoded the entire form to a single json string' and the stage where you 'actually send the data', you compare the json to the submission_cache variable. If it matches you ignore the submission, if it doesn't match then you store a copy of the json (or a sha1 checksum of it) in submission_cache, and then just continue with the ajax stuff.
This way:
Since it is a variable on the page, the cache has the same lifetime as the page. If they leave your site and return later, the variable will be empty again, and they can submit identical info as the last time.
Secondly, if they notice they made a typo 1ms after they submitted, they can resubmit (since the cache wont match), which i imagine is desirable.
Another solution that you could use in addition to the above is to simply enable the disabled attribute on the submit button (inside your onsubmit handler function. Re-enable it after a setTimeout or in one of your ajax onreceived/onerror closures.

Change element value on external website

I have such a problem - I want to change value of an element on some external website.
Namely: I have webcam http interface which is password protected and there is a page with motion detection checkbox and "Apply" button (form submit). I want to create simple program with some sort of delayed toggling of motion detection (so I can launch this program and have some time to leave the building before motion detection starts). So I want to change checkbox state and write this change to system. I tried something like this, but that doesn't work:
jQuery.get("http://admin:password#192.168.0.1:12345/motion-page.asp",
function(data){
$('input[name="checkbox1"]').prop('checked', false);
// and there "simulate" clicking on Apply button - submit the form -- don't know how ...
}
);
Can anybody help me with this, please?
I would backtrack from the page that shows when you submit the camera form. See if the form itself is submitting the "turn camera on" variable as GET or POST. If you already know this, then all you would have to do is access the same URL as the form from the camera (assuming it's HTTP accessible on a network like this) and submit that same set of variables.
If you don't want to open a browser to do this, you could write yourself a custom application that submits it for you, but either way you have to open something to make the submission, as a script has to wait [X] amount of time before making the request. The fastest way will be through a browser.
I am not sure you need jquery for this (I never use jquery hardly at all). What I would do on the scripting side, since merely accessing this script means you want to activate the timer most likely, would be to create a timer object in javascript, and then make a single function that either accesses the URL of the camera form submission with the GET string parameters (that's easiest if it's doable via GET, because you wont have to build a form), or, if it's POST, have the function build a form and submit the form via POST to the same URL.
Google how to create a timer in javascript, and google how to automatically submit a form. Doing the code for you would be a waste of my time if you can figure it out on your own. If not, come back and we'll see what we can do :)
Good luck.
Why not after hitting the submit button, or after checking the box, have javascript actually run a timer? Look into the timer functions in js or jquery if that's more your thing. Not sure if you need it written to disk or whatever... since you're not giving much info, but whatever data you're wanting recorded could be captured when the box is checked and can be submitted along with the form whenever the timer runs out.
Submitting a form in jquery is simple:
http://api.jquery.com/submit/
:)

javascript error form validation: all inputs fields are cleared on submitting

am using a form to register the user on my website and i have a captcha security on it. Everything is working well and good but the only problem that i am facing is that if i enter a wrong captcha or somehow the page refreshes , all the data entered by the user is wiped out.
what i wish to achieve is that even if the captcha entered is wrong and the form is submitted , the form should have all the fields intact as the user filled in excluding the captcha field.
How can this be done? My form is html and by using javascript im validating it
Some browsers may be smart enough to do this, but if you want to make sure, the only way to retain data across a page reload/refresh (including form submission) is to keep it on the server, and/or put it in a cookie.
However, instead of using a submit button, you could use a normal button with an onclick() function which validates the data first, then manually submits the form if appropriate.
document.forms["form_name"].submit()
You also have to handle key events for the form text inputs, to prevent enter from submitting.
However, this is still much easier in the end, since it prevents the page from changing and doesn't require server side storage or cookies.

Text box that the user fills and then is saved?

I'm fairly ok with HTML and Javascript but any lanuage solution will do as a learning experience.
I want to have many small text boxs on a website that the user can write into and on hitting enter the text box's value becomes what was input. The text box must be saved so that it can be seen by other uses of the website and updated.
Most of all I'd like it to be simple as there are 36 boxes in total.
Thanks in advance
Here is a way derived of the autoSave we do in our web app:
the user enter a field. The onfocus event is triggered, and start a setInterval to check for changes
if a change occurs, the database is updated with the new value of the field. You need to choose the time you wait before saving. 250ms seems natural in our app.
each key stroke clearInterval the pending setInterval
In parallel another setInterval checks if the database has changed, like a doc version.If so, the fields modified by others are updated.
The polling in the step 4. could be replaced by a WebSocket if you have the chance to target only modern browsers.

How to submit form with data before logging someone out?

I'm using the document.form.submit() function for a rather large input form (hundreds of fields, it's an inventory application). I'm calling this after the user has been idle for a certain amount of time and I would like to save any data they've typed. When I try this the page reloads (the action is #) but any new text typed in the fields is not passed in the REQUEST, so I don't get to put it in the DB. Is there some fundamental reason why this happens or is my code just not playing nice together (I'm using the EXTJS grid view to show the form and a library for tracking idle time)?
Thanks,
Robert
I guess I put the answer here. What I found was that doing this:
setTimeout('frm.submit();', 2000);
caused the page to reload but didn't submit the form. When I did this:
frm.submit();
The form was submitted and the data was passed. I don't know why the first way didn't work, but I don't need to know that:)
Might the server be voiding out the input values. Say if your page on the server looks like this:
<form action="/page.cgi">
...
<input name="Fieldx" value=""/>
</form>
I think it'll void out the field. Or this the server action might be setting it indirectly. In JSF, something like this.
<input name="Fieldx" value="#{bean.nullProperty}"/>
What do you have on the server and what's your browser?
I would try to catch the HTML post request to see if the input fields are included. If they are then your server has problem.
But regarding what you said, I think it's because there's conflict in the way your browser handles JavaScript DOM. This may be the case if you leave out the submit button on your form and it works.
The submit method of HTMLFormElement objects should just submit the form, as if the user had clicked the submit button. So, if the action attribute of the form is set to #, it would just seem to refresh the page, because it’s sending the form data to the same page.
Strange that it still does it when you set the action attribute to another page though.
Is the method attribute of the form set to get or post?

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