[whatwg] Any way to submit only those parts of a form that havechanged?

[Ben Meadowcroft]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: whatwg-whatwg.org-bounces at lists.whatwg.org 
> [mailto:whatwg-whatwg.org-bounces at lists.whatwg.org] On Behalf 
> Of Ian Hickson
> Sent: 11 December 2004 05:06
> To: dolphinling
> Cc: WHAT WG List
> Subject: Re: [whatwg] Any way to submit only those parts of a 
> form that havechanged?
> 
> 
> On Fri, 10 Dec 2004, dolphinling wrote:
> >
> > I don't feel like doing a detailed readthrough of the spec again 
> > (though
> > I did glance at parts that looked relevant), but is there 
> anything in 
> > WF2 that allows only parts of a form that have changed from their 
> > default value to be submitted?
> 
> There isn't; what would the use case be?

Sometimes it's just nice to know!

Seriously though I recently had to frig this by adding hidden form
elements using Javascript to the form on an onchange handler indicating
when a field had been changed so you don't have to do lookups on the
backend data first to decide if there has been a change or not. You can
then dynamically construct an update statement (in SQL say) that only
updates those fields that have changed (Which might be important if
updating certain fields could lead to lots of potentially expensive
trigger knock ons in the database).

-- 
Ben Meadowcroft
http://www.benmeadowcroft.com/
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