Autosave when entering text in a text area or rich text area

Our customers have some forms that have text or rich text areas that are intended to include more than a few lines of text. Sometimes it will take a user minutes to even hours to enter data into one of these text areas.

While they are doing this autosaves do not happen. Autosave seems to be triggered by a focus change between the widgets in the form. So selecting another control or any of the formatting buttons in the rich text area will cause an autosave to occur if it has been N seconds since the last autosave.

The problem is the user could loose all of what they have entered into a text box if they didn't click/tab to some other control prior to a system/browser/PC problem that causes the browser or user session to terminate.

Is there a way to have autosave run during text entry into one of these controls? I've also noticed this for the other controls (Input Field, etc). If you stay on the field after a change, the change is not autosaved.

Hi Brian,

For regular XForms controls we support the incremental mode, which you enable by adding the incremental="true" on the element. It's not enabled by default, because it adds quite a bit of chatter between the client and server. So this is something you can use if you have textareas.

We don't yet support the incremental mode for the Formatted Text control (see https://github.com/orbeon/orbeon-forms/issues/1424), but that control out-of-the-box sends updates to the server every time you hit enter, which is far from perfect, but better than nothing. If you're using that control, and having the server updated as users type is important to you, just let us know, and we'll see if this is something we can do.

Alex