Rails + jQuery - Using jQuery to submit the form w/o the Submit button

Question

Given:

<%=form_for [:project, @note], :remote => true do |f| %>

I'd like to create a jquery bind that automatically saves every few seconds. I'm not worried about the timing part yet, just how to use jquery to submit the form automatically (ie, not submit button click by the user.)

I tried this, but it isn't working. Suggestions?

$('form[data-remote]').live('submit', function (e) {
    alert(1);
    e.preventDefault();
});

Thanks!

Answer 1

$('form[data-remote]').submit() will submit the form.

Answer 2

So you are talking about something like Autosave, right?

Maybe you want to specify a Javascript interval to this. An example could be:

var autosave = window.setInterval("autosaveForm()", 1000);

function autosaveForm() {
  $('form[data-remote]').submit();
}

What this does is to call autosaveForm() every second and submits the form. To stop the autosave you could just use clearInterval like this:

window.clearInterval(autosave);

I hope this helps.

Answer 3

Start with setInterval:

  setInterval(transmit, 3000);

Which calls this function:

function transmit(){
 // get the form field data
 var params = {
   formField1:$("input#formField1").val(),
   formField2:$("input#formField2").val()
 }

 // make the ajax call
 var url = "/controller/action";
   $.post(url, params,
     function(response, status){
     //display results(response, status);
   });
}

Answer 4

What version of jQuery are you using? Are you using IE? The early versions of live() didn't work with IE for form submits. (See http://github.com/rails/jquery-ujs/issues/issue/8)

I think I ended up using this:

if (jQuery.browser.msie){
    $("form[data-remote]").delegate("input[type='submit'],button[type='submit'],input[name='commit']", 'click', function(e) {
        $(this).parents("form[data-remote]").submit();
        if(e.preventDefault) e.preventDefault();
    });
}

in a project.