Develop Reference

Is there any way to do a non-Ajax form submission with pure JSON data, with jQuery?

I was able to find this old question, which offered a consolation prize that I may end up using: if you want to feed JSON to the server on a POST whole page update, you are able to assign the JSON content to a (perhaps hidden) input.
However, I wanted to check in as far as reality checks go. jQuery has, as a basic and straightforward feature to offer, the ability to call jQuery.ajax() with, as one major option, a JSON string sent as the query string. And it's almost a non-option to fail to provide this functionality; people have come to expect to be able to provide pure-JSON data either way including contexts unrelated to the web and between two non-JavaScript endpoints.
Is there a non-workaround way now to do a page submit with the query string being neither more nor less than whatever JSON string encodes what the developer is sending?

introduce a draft like functionality using javascript

I have a stand alone HTML form, and I want to add a functionality similar to a save as draft. If suppose the user fills up half form and decides to pause and continue filling form some time later . When the user visits the website again the previously filled data should be available to the user. In simple words I want to achieve something like save and complete the form later.
Also to add this is a stand alone HTML form using javascript. When I browsed on the net one suggestion I found was localStorage. But just want to know if there is some other way of achieving this functionality. Please direct me to some useful link which can help me with this feature.

If you act on the client you may use all the clientside persistent facilities currently available like local storage, websql, cookies.
I think that local storage is the easier to implement and you find a lot of libraries that provide you a friendly interface to interact with it like http://www.jstorage.info/ for jQuery or https://github.com/tymondesigns/angular-locker for AngularJS.
What you need to do is something like:
var frm = $(document.myform);
var inputs = frm.find('input');
inputs.change(function() {
var data = JSON.stringify(frm.serializeArray());
localStorage.setItem("form", data);
})
You can put a check for the existence of that key in local storage during the page load and then populate the form accordingly.
Hope it helps :)

There are only a few ways to do this. A completely portable implementation will require server-side changes.
localStorage - Save Form using localstorage HTML5
 Use Javascript to save the data which is entered into the form as it changes. I recommend implementing this layer no matter which version you decide to go with.
Save in database - Examples vary by back-end language.
 The simplest implementation of this is to add a single boolean column to your database which indicates all data necessary to continue has been collected. This version has the benefit of being usable across machines.
Cloud storage - http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSJavaScriptSDK/guide/browser-intro.html
 You might consider using a service like Amazon DynamoDB or another NoSQL cloud storage system to cache data like this. The convenience of sending a JSON object to most NoSQL engines and restoring the same to a form is great, and codes very similar to the localStorage version.
Q-Code / Code restoration - http://webqr.com/
 This, in my opinion, is the worst option. However, it may fit your scenario. Generate a Q-Code which the user can scan to restore the page with the data. Q-Codes can hold a surprising amount of data. If your form doesn't use much text entry, you might get away with giving the user a short code (5-8 characters) which can be used to restore the form state.

Run Database Stored RegEx against DOM

I have a question about how to approach a certain scenario before I get halfway through it and figure out it was not the best option.
I work for a large company that has a team that creates tools for the team mates to use that aren’t official enterprise tools. We have no access to the database directly, just access to an internal server to store our files to run and be able to access the main site with javascript etc (same domain).
What I am working on is a tool that has a ton of options in it that allow you to select that I will call “data points” on a page.
There are things like “Account status, Balance, Name, Phone number, email etc” and have it save those to an excel sheet.
So you input account numbers, choose what you need and then using IE Objects it navigates to the page and scrapes data you request.
My question is as follows..
I want to make the scraping part pretty Dynamic in the way it works. I want to be able to add new datapoints on the fly.
My goal or idea is so store the regular expression needed to get the specific piece of data in the table with the “data point option”.
If I choose “Name” it knows the expression for name in the database to run again the DOM.
What would be the best way about creating that type of function in Javascript / Jquery?
I need to pass a Regex to a function, have it run against the DOM and then return the result.
I have a feeling that there will be things that require more than 1 step to get the information etc.
I am just trying to think of the best way to approach it without having to hardcode 200+ expressions into the file as the page may get updated and need to be changed.
Any ideas?

IRobotSoft scraper may be the tool you are looking for. Check this forum and see if questions are similar to what you are doing: http://irobotsoft.org/bb/YaBB.pl?board=newcomer. It is free.
What it uses is not regular expression but a language called HTQL, which may be more suitable for extracting web pages. It also supports regular expression, but not as the main language.
It organizes all your actions well with a visual interface, so you can dynamically compose actions or tasks for changing needs.

Detect the referral/s of Url/s using JavaScript or PHP from inside a Bookmarklet

Let's think out of the box!
Without any programming skills, how can you say/detect if you are on a web page that lists products, and not on the page that prints specific details of a product?
The Bookmarklet is inserted using JavaScript in right after the body tag of a website ( eBay, Bloomingdales, Macy's, toys'r'us ... )
Now, my story is: (programming skills needed now)
I have a bookmarklet and my main problem is how to detect if I am on a page that lists products or if i am on the page that prints the product detail.
The best way that I could think, to detect if I am on the detail page of a product is to detect the referral(s) of the current URL. (maybe all the referrals, the entire click history)
Possible problem: a user adds the URL as favorite and does not use my bookmarklet, and closes the browser; then the user uses the browser again, clicks the favorite link and uses my bookmaklet and I think that I can't detect the referral in this case; it's OK, not all the cases are covered or possible;
Can I detect the referral of this link using the cache in this case? (many browsers cache systems involved here, I know)

how can you say/detect if you are on a web page that lists products, and not on the page that prints specific details of a product
I'd setup Brain.js (a neural net implemented in javascript) and train it up on a (necessarily broad and varied) sample set of DOMs and then pick a threshold product:details ratio to 'detect' (as near as possible) what type of page I'm on.
This will require some trial and error, but is the best approach I can think of (neural nets can get to "good enough" results pretty quickly - try it, you'll be surprised at the results).

No. You can't check history with a bookmarklet, or with any normal client side JavaScript. You are correct, the referrer will be empty if loaded from a bookmark.
The bookmarklet can however store the referrer the first time it is used in a cookie or in localStorage and then the next time it is used, if referrer is empty, check the cookie or localStorage.
That said, your entire approach to this problem seems really odd to me, but I don't have enough details to know if it is genius our insanity.
If I was trying to determine if the current page was a list or a details page, I'd either inspect the url for common patterns or inspect the content of the page for common patterns.
Example of common url patterns: Many 'list pages' are search results, so query string will have words like "search=", "q=", "keywords=", etc.
Example of page content patterns: A product page will have only 1 "buy" button or "add to cart", whatever. A list page will have either no such button or have many.

Why don't u use the URL? then you can do something like this http://www.le.url.com?pageid=10&type=DS and then the code will be something like this:
<?php
if(isset($_GET['type']) && $_GET['type'] == 'DS'){
// Do stuff related to Details Show
} else{
// Show all the products
}
?>
And you can make the url something like this with an .htacces file:
http://www.le.url.com/10/DS

I would say your goal should first be for it to work for some websites. Then many websites and then eventually all websites.
A) Try hand coding the main sites like Amazon, eBay etc... Have a target in mind.
B) Something more creative might be to keep a list of all currency symbols then detect if a page has maybe 10 scattered around. For instance the $ symbol is found all over amazon. But only when there is say 20 per page can you really say that it is a product listing (this is a bad example, amazon's pages are fairly crazy). Perhaps the currency symbols won't work; however, I think you can you can generalize something similar. Perhaps tons of currency symbols plus detection of a "grid" type system with things lined up in a row. You'll get lots of garbage so you'll need good filtering. Data analysis is needed after you have something working algorithmically like this.
C) I think after B) you'll realize that your system might be better with parts of A). In other words you are going to want to customize the hell out of certain popular websites (or more niche ones for that matter). This should help fill the gap for sites that don't follow any known models.
Now as far as tracking where the user came from why not use a tracking cookie type concept. You could of course use indexedDB or localstorage or whatever. In other words always keep a reference to the last page by saving it on the current page. You could also do things like have a stack and push urls onto it on every page. If you want to save it for some reason just send that data back to your server.
Detecting favorite clicks could involve detecting all AJAX traffic and analyzing it (although this might be hard...). You should first do a survey to see what those calls typically look like. I'd imaging something like amazon.com/favorite/product_id would be fairly common. Also... you could try to detect the selector for the "favorite" button on the page then add an onclick handler to detect when it is clicked.
I tried to solve each problem you mentioned. I don't think I understand exactly what you are trying to do.

Is there any alternative to obfuscation to make it harder to get any string in javascript?

I use DropBox and I've had some trouble reaching to my files from other computers:
I not always want to login to anything when I'm in a public computer, but I like being able to reach my stuff from wherever I am.
So I've made a simple application that when put in the public folder, ran and given the right UID, creates (still in your public folder) an HTML of all the content in the folder (including subfolders) as a tree of links.
But I didn't risk loading it anywhere, since there are slightly private things in there (yes, I know that the folder's name is "PUBLIC").
So I've came up with the idea to make it a simple login page, given the right password, the rest of the page should load. brilliant!, but how?
If I did this by redirecting to other HTML on the same folder, I'd still put the html link in the web history and the "url's accessed" history of the administrator. So I should generate itin the same page.
I've done it:
alt text http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3045472/validate.png
And currently the page is a textbox and a button, and only if you type in the right password (defined in the generator) the rest of the page (with the link-tree) loads. The fault is that everything (password, URL's) is easily reachable through the source code.
Now, assuming I only want to avoid silly people to get it all too easily, not make a bulletproof all-content-holding NSA certified website, I though about some ways to make these information a bit harder to get.
As you may have already figured, I use a streamwritter to write an html file (head, loop through links, bottom), then it's extremely configurable, and I can come up with a pretty messy-but-working c# code, though my javascript knowledge is not that good.
Public links in DropBox look like this:
Summarizing: How do I hide the URL's ande the password to show them (MAINLY the password, of course) in my source-code so that no that it should require some effort on reading ?
P.S.: It's not that personal, if someone REALLY wants it, it could never be 100% protected, and if it was that important, I wouldnt put it in the public folder, also, if the dude really wants to get it that hard, he should deserve it.
P.S. 2.: "Use the ultra-3000'tron obfuscator!!11" is not a real answer, since my javascript is GENERATED by my c# program.
P.S. 3.: I don't want other solutions as "use a serverside application and host it somewhere to redirect and bla bla" or "compress the links in a .RAR file and put a password in it" since I'm doing this ALSO to learn, and I want the thrill of it =)
Update 1:
The one answer so far gives a perfect way (according to this question) to hide my password.
Now I want a good way to hide the URL's, maby a code snippet of the example URL I gave being composed, and if it's too tricky, maby how to generate it in C#, or anything ?
Update 2:
I thought about maybe making three "obfuscating methods" and choosing them randomly in the runtime. So anyone who figures out how to read one XML, could only read about one third of them, and maybe having a hard time finding the other rest of this third..
Update 3:
Just thought about REGEX, the URL could be neatly crowded by dummy not-url-allowed characters added randomly that would be removed by something like:
regex.replace(url, ^[^\w\d/:-\.%]+$,"")
So the nosy dude should have to be pretty advanced into programming somehow, eh? could anyone tell me if it would work or not ?

Well, as it seems you already know, this is a rather poor choice of security mechanism, but if you insist...
Don't store the actual string in the source. Store, for example, its MD5 hash. Then, when the user types in a password, compute its MD5 hash and compare it with the expected one.
Check out:
MD5 in JavaScript
MD5 in C#

To elaborate on miorel's idea, you can also encrypt the whole page, using password as a key. Basically, encode all content into one big string, ask for the password and decrypt that string. If the password is wrong, it will show loads of rubbish, that is it. Like
content = "encrypted string"
function decrypt(str, key) { your algorithm of choice here }
document.write(decrypt(content, prompt('Password?')))
The only thing you need is a decrypt implementation in javascript - but that's easy to google out, for example here or here.
This also renders the separate 'login' page useless.

Granted, this is akin to asking how you can strip in public without people seeing you, but given that, I'm assuming that the password you are trying to store is the one to DropBox. I suppose you could obfuscate the password and store it in a cookie. That would at least prevent someone from simply viewing the source to see the password, but obviously wouldn't stop someone running something like Fiddler and seeing it.
[snipped server side suggestion]
EDIT: To munge the Urls, why don't you simply build the urls on the fly and have the links call a javascript function to get the url? Your server-side code would populate an array in this function with obfuscated urls and the calling code would simply pass an index into the array. Thus, on viewing the source, there would be no instances of "http" anywhere other than static unsecure links.
ADDITION Ok. now that I have a better bead on the problem, it is easier to devise solution. There are libraries for doing encryption on the net in javascript (e.g. http://point-at-infinity.org/jsaes/) but the problem comes down to key management. Since its javascript, it is going to be public but there are hoops you can devise to make it harder to determine the key. In general, those tricks involve indirection. For example, store a lengthy stream of random characters (e.g. 40-50 or more) that is generated by your C# code and stored in the HTM file. In addition, the C# code would would store into your javascript function an array numeric values that represent pointers into the long stream of text that were used by the C# code to encrypt the passwords (or just the whole url).