Comments on: Difference form submission in Javascript

By: Difference form submission in Javascript - follow up | Fliquid Studios

Difference form submission in Javascript - follow up | Fliquid Studios — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 00:25:17 +0000

[...] December 2008 I wrote an article introducing the concept of Difference forum submission in Javascript. We received some positive responses from this article and some requests for examples of exactly [...]

By: Michael Little

Michael Little — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 22:14:00 +0000

I am not an ASP.NET developer so please correct me if I am wrong but my understanding of view state is that it is intended to maintain (persist) state across multiple posts. It does this by adding a hidden field to the page that carries around ALL of the data potentially making the requests quite large.

The main purpose of the concept I am proposing is to reduce the number of fields being posted back to the server (either for performance or to allow multiple users to edit the same record concurrently). Another major difference is that this concept is purely Javascript. It doesn’t require anything to be done on the server side other than for you application to be aware that not all fields will always be posted.

Hope that helps to clear things up.

By: Chase Saunders

Chase Saunders — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 15:34:34 +0000

This kinda sounds like ASP.NET’s ViewState mechanism

By: Nitin Reddy

Nitin Reddy — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 11:26:38 +0000

Hi!

I’ve been using difference form submission through custom Javascript as I’m not aware of any library that does this. I usually have to rebuild the script for each project due to intellectual property issues

-Nitin

By: Michael Little

Michael Little — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 10:36:00 +0000

We haven’t done any benchmarking to measure performance. Any performance increase or request size reduction would no doubt be minimal unless you are dealing with quite large forms. The main reason we have used it was to avoid “clobbering” of data in high user applications.

I have developed an application that uses this concept in AJAX. It does perform the form submission slightly differently to typical forms and so does not need to disable the fields themselves. It would also be possible to disable and re-enable the fields.

I will be posting an example library for this concept soon and I will also investigate the possibility of writing a jQuery plugin.

Thanks for your comments.

By: Loïc Hoguin

Loïc Hoguin — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 09:59:41 +0000

That’s interesting indeed. Do you have any numbers showing how much it helps? Also, do you use it with xmlhttprequest queries? Because if you leave the form available for more input you’d need to reenable the correct fields too.

A jQuery plugin would be great, especially one that could work side by side with the form plugin.

By: Jann

Jann — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 09:48:15 +0000

good idea to use default values. Didn’t know they exists.