ASP.NET Forms autosave

Question

We have an internal asp.net forms application, where one page is essentially a WYSIWYG editor in which users enter 3-5 paragraphs. What are the best options for autosave with a minimum number of user interrupts? I don’t want to force a return every five minutes, unless I need to, but maybe some kind of client-side check every time the text changes and compares with the last when the information was sent, and go from there?

Answer 1

This is an ideal task that can be solved with AJAX. You can set some kind of timer to start, which starts as soon as the user makes a change on the client side, and then he will make an asynchronous client client connection back to your server to send the contents of the wysiwyg field. You can then turn off the timer until the user starts editing again to avoid the need for asynchronous calls.

This will certainly prevent user interruption via postback.

There are many ways to do this, but the following msdn link would be a good start:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb398785.aspx

Essentially, this gives you an overview, but the main bit that you need to focus on is viewing javascript web services:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb398998.aspx