JQuery Autosave

Nice, but I question if this needs to be made into a plugin. There's a need to hook up things on the server side, and the same thing can be accomplished by writing 20 lines of code.

Here's something I wrote for my translation site:

        jQuery(function($){
            var save_txt = '{{ _('Save') }}';
            var saving_txt = '{{ _('Saving...') }}';
            var saved_txt = '{{ _('Saved') }}';
            
            function save(){
                $('#save').val(saving_txt).attr('disabled', 'disabled');
                $.post(window.location.pathname, {
                        action: 'save',
                        translated_text: $('#translated_text').val()
                    }, function(html){
                        $('#save').val(saved_txt);
                });
            }
            
            var timer;
            $('#translated_text').keyup(function(){
                window.clearTimeout(timer);
                $('#save').val(save_txt).attr('disabled', null);
                timer = window.setTimeout(save, 5000);
            })
            .focus();
            
            $('#save').click(function(){
                window.clearTimeout(timer);
                save();
                return false;
            });
        });

Multiple issues I solved when doing similar things:

1) Must have some sort of queue-like behavior, or race conditions. In other words I want a guarantee that all saves happen in order (imagine a checkbox, and due to latency in network traffic of the user checks it on, then off. What state was saved the on or off for one of them? I don't like these race conditions) this can happen for any input type.

2) What happens if the data must be extracted weirdly, or weird parameters sent to the url. A data extractor is a useful concept to have be passed in.

3) Indication to the user that it works. Like what gmail does. A useful feature.

4) What if its not a form, or different elements go to different urls? Also a useful thing to do.

This sort of tool became a cornerstone of some very cool form interaction mechanisms.

I guess the idea of this plugin would be to have a gracefully-degrading auto-saving form that preserves values while the user types for recovery purposes.

This seems overly complicated.

I just set live click and change listeners on the elements I was looking to save and incremented a change_counter each time these were triggered. if (change_counter % 5 == 0) Data.sendData();