Save-As-You-Type cfinput or cftextarea?

[solaced]

I am creating a form which lets users submit a job application. My main concern is that it will take people quite a lot of time to write their personal statements and experiences and the Session will timeout which means the work they have done so far will be lost. This would be very annoying to me!

The best solution would be for my form to save their work as they type, especially in the cftextarea and cfinput elements.

Could anyone please suggest how this may be achieved?

[Dan_Bracuk · Accepted solution]

I take a different approach to this.  I put a very small iframe on the page.  It contains a page that does a meta refresh at the required interval.  This keeps the session alive.

[solaced]

I used the iframe suggestion and it works great.

I also added a UUID generator to append to the URL on the meta-referesh so that it does not cache. I stole that from somewhere else I can't remember!

[WolfShade]

Do you have to use session for this?  I'm assuming that the session is for "logged in"?

^_^

[solaced]

I have just started using Google Mail and it does a very good job what I was trying to achieve. If you start typing an email and then click to go elsewhere, it will save your email as a draft. How do they achieve this without the user actually pressing any kind of submit button to save the email?

[Dan_Bracuk]

Google probably does it better than me, but if I were going to try that, I would write a js function that posts the the content of the form fields of interest to a coldfusion page that saves them somewhere.

I would call this function every x seconds, plus from the onblur event of the textarea.