Is there a recommended approach to handle saving data in response to within-site navigation without
- by Carvell Fenton
Hello all,
Preamble to scope my question:
I have a web app (or site, this is an internal LAN site) that uses jQuery and AJAX extensively to dynamically load the content section of the UI in the browser. A user navigates the app using a navigation menu. Clicking an item in the navigation menu makes an AJAX call to php, and php then returns the content that is used to populate the central content section.
One of the pages served back by php has a table form, set up like a spreadsheet, that the user enters values into. This table is always kept in sync with data in the database. So, when the table is created, is it populated with the relevant database data. Then when the user makes a change in a "cell", that change immediately is written back to the database so the table and database are always in sync. This approach was take to reassure users that the data they entered has been saved (long story...), and to alleviate them from having to click a save button of some kind.
So, this always in sync idea is great, except that a user can enter a value in a cell, not take focus out of the cell, and then take any number of actions that would cause that last value to be lost: e.g. navigate to another section of the site via the navigation menu, log out of the app, close the browser, etc.
End of preamble, on to the issue:
I initially thought that wasn't a problem, because I would just track what data was "dirty" or not saved, and then in the onunload event I would do a final write to the database. Herein lies the rub: because of my clever (or not so clever, not sure) use of AJAX and dynamically loading the content section, the user never actually leaves the original url, or page, when the above actions are taken, with the exception of closing the browser. Therefore, the onunload event does not fire, and I am back to losing the last data again.
My question, is there a recommended way to handle figuring out if a person is navigating away from a "section" of your app when content is dynamically loaded this way?
I can come up with a solution I think, that involves globals and tracking the currently viewed page, but I thought I would check if there might be a more elegant solution out there, or a change I could make in my design, that would make this work.
Thanks in advance as always!
