Well, I wouldn't do it. I would not want to commit the data entry until it is all input - all none, atomicity is goodness. Countless times I have started filling out some form myself - realized I didn't want to go through with it for some reason or other and bailed out. If perchance one of the early values was my social security number, it's not so cool that it has already gone to the server even though I believe I've cancelled my form.
There may well be validation issues that can't be resolved with only part of the form posted, too. The network/timeout issues are only magnified - 50 chances to fail vs one. Save the values in a cookie if need be, so they don't get lost if there's a failure. Better still, use an Ajax post technique to send the data. Trap any error from that and deal with it. Your form full of data will not have gone away, so you can recover easily from the error, perhaps completely unbeknownst to the user you could retry or resubmit to a backup server if the primary has gone dead. Don On Nov 27, 7:01 pm, hanther <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'm thinking about adding the functionality to auto save the user's > data using ajax calls after each time he leaves a field and has > changed the data in it, but my concern is about the amount of traffic > and calls this will generate between the browser and the web server. > Should I be concerned about this type thing of this in this day and > age? > > Overall, there aren't many fields - less than 50, but I can end up > with multiple rows of data within it, ex a list of names with their > related address, street, province/state, etc > > Besides the obvious point of the user never losing any of his data due > to session timeout or network issues, another reason for me wanting to > do this is because the data entered in certain fields can affect other > fields, and generate errors and warnings that the user must address, > so I'm thinking this would be a nice way of 'instant notification' of > issues with the data > > Anybody have any thoughts? > > Thanks, > Cory
