auto-saving?
I've been asked if Quick Base can auto-save every so often, like an Office or Google app. I don't believe that it can, but I'm double checking. Is this something that browsers can do in general?
Forum Discussion
- If you could explain what you are trying to do that would help because right now a lot of assumptions need to be made to even try and answer this. How do you see this working? Would it save the record automatically so they could come back later if they were afk for ~10 minutes? Things like that.
There is nothing stopping someone from saving an incomplete record right now. If you have things like notifications or automations that fire when a record is added there are things you can do to stop that. The simplest for me is having a checkbox on the form, like "Completed", where the user checks it before saving when the record is fully ready. Then your automations could also look for that box to be checked to know it was finished. There are other ways too that would not require the user to click anything for you to know the record was ready but that depends on your form and how complicated it is probably. - Just to avoid losing work if, for example, the power went out. For example with Microsoft Office applications you can set it to auto-save at certain intervals.
- MS Office applications create files. When you do work on a file, it changes, and must be saved. The file you have open persists until you close it, and must be saved (or autosaved) for the work you've done to persist. This is not really analogous to work that's done on Quick Base. Every time you load a different page, whatever you've done before has already been "saved".
AustinK's main question was a little subtle. Do your users have single add or edit record forms open for many minutes at a time? Or perhaps grid edit? Can you tell us more about what you are trying to do?
- That is going to be difficult to do.
I can think of a couple ways it *might* be able to be done via JavaScript and image on load or similar. However I think it would be an awful user experience because it would have to essentially save and reload the record in the middle of them working. Not great and will likely be more frustrating to your users than the small chance of losing work. They will have to deal with that every day.
I think that for the most part you do not see many people talking about this because a power loss or some other issue is only going to affect a single record for most users. Yes some work is lost but it isn't like you are losing the days work or anything like that, unless your form is huge.
How big are the forms your users are filling out? Would it make sense at all to break them into smaller forms? If it is very large and takes a lot of time to fill out you could split it into several forms. That way when data loss did happen it would only be a small portion of the form.
Sorry that I do not have a good answer for you here. Maybe someone else will chime in with some other ideas. - Hi Sarah. One low-tech solution if you�re at all interested is just to make it easy for for the users to save and keep working. You know how the save button can be split and changed it was Savin keep working button?
Well it�s also possible with a bit of easy code to make an extra button on the form to Save and keep working. Let me know if you were interested in that and I can look up that code for you.
