[Building Sakai] autosave

[Matthew Jones]

I think it would depend on what your use case is.

If you wanted the instructor to be able to recover and work on it at a
later time, the functionality already exists for most tools in the form of
"Hide this document". It doesn't auto-hide it, but this is something that
could  potentially be enabled. Though I think the user can also go through
the workflow and hit the "Hide" button just the same as the submit button.
These are tools like announcements and assignment. (With an open date)

If we wanted to protect the user from their browser crashing, the server
crashing, session time out or hitting refresh or something, then this
plugin looks interesting:
http://simsalabim.github.com/sisyphus/

It saves specific form elements to local storage and recovers them all on
the reload unless submit was hit. Most of our tools have static ids (rather
than dynamically generated ids) so it should work for complex forms like in
assignments or announcements. This would also protect in case of a server
going down unexpectedly, which a solution of saving to a server wouldn't.

I think the biggest issue, playing with this plugin is that if you someone
opened multiple tabs pages with the same form names, it ends saving each to
the same document storage, not being able to distinguish which is correct.
Maybe there's some creative way to deal with this and still recovered lost
form data?

-Matthew

On Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 10:49 AM, Charles Hedrick <hedrick at rutgers.edu>wrote:

>
> On Dec 7, 2011, at 10:41 AM, Zhen Qian wrote:
>
> > Chuck,
> >
> > I think it has long been a desired feature.
> >
> > It should be easy to import into Assignment, since it has "save draft"
> action in place, for both assignment and assignment submission objects.
> >
> > Announcement is tricky, since draft announcement is the one with open
> date in the future.
>
> I see that. It's particularly tricky if you're editing an existing
> announcement, since you need to save the draft but not publish it.
>
> > Not sure about Resource tool, since it has different workflows for
> different resource types.
>
> That will have the same issue if the document exists.
>
> Yes, I being to see the issues. I'd still like to do something if we can.
>
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > - Zhen
> >
> > On Dec 7, 2011, at 10:30 AM, Charles Hedrick wrote:
> >
> >> A couple of years ago we did autosave for tests and quizzes. It's
> helped a lot with students losing work. However there are lots of other
> tools, many of which would be more directed at instructors.
> >>
> >> How would you feel about trying to do a few of the more used tools for
> 2.10? Announcements, assignments, page editing in resources?
> >>
> >> It's actually fairly easy. The Javascript used for Samigo should work
> with minor changes. The main thing is that there needs to be a "save draft"
> function that the Javascript can submit to.
> >>
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