Need a recommendation on an autosave script

JavaScript
1

I just finished a large form (40+ fields) that will take users some time to complete. There are a lot of textareas, so a lot of typing (or copy/pasting) will be involved, so I don’t want users to lose information they entered.

I was searching Google for an auto-save (sort of like the one on this forum) but they all look like they function very differently. I’m assuming the auto-save submits the info to my database, but maybe I’m wrong. Do they save the info to a temp file somewhere? Does anybody have a favorite one they can recommend?

We already load jQuery on each page, so that’s available to use.

2

What is your browser support like? If you are only supporting IE8+ then you can use localStorage and serialize the form into a JSON object, from there you can use JSON.stringify() as localStorage only accepts strings.

3

There are a couple of good ways of doing an autosave. If you’re dealing with less than 4096 bytes of data, you can easily store the information as a cookie. See for example: https://github.com/carhartl/jquery-cookie

If there’s likely to be more than 4096 bytes, then storing it as local data is a better solution. jQuery has a good data api to help you with that.

Or, if you don’t want to roll your own solution, there are a number of [URL=“https://github.com/nervetattoo/jquery-autosave”]jquery [URL=“https://github.com/BenGriffiths/jquery-save-as-you-type”]form [URL=“http://www.simonbattersby.com/blog/using-the-jquery-autosave-plugin/”]autosave [URL=“https://bitbucket.org/stanlemon/jquery-autosave/src”]plugins that make it much easier to achieve.

4

Thanks Paul, I’ll look at those plugins. I am pretty hopeless when it comes to JS!

I’d seen some of those plugins, but I was wondering if anyone had a specific one to recommend out of them.