Spree4.com the much loved brain child of the Jackson Brothers, is at long last going to get it's redesign finished.

I’ve worked for years in Notes so it shouldn’t really surprise me now, but I find myself constantly surprised by just how much time I have to waste covering for this <the following sentence was censored>.

I had the misfortune today to be replicating a form into notes. I had sorted the basic structure and started on the more "complex” (complex said laughably) functionality.

That’s when I hit my first snag, needing to change the source of a dialogList field from the address picker to a list from another field based on other factors. "Standard” notes procedure has you making two fields one with address picker one pointing to the field, both feeding the required field and hiding appropriately. Normally this would work, not in my instance. Thanks to a happy alignment of Notes’ frankly idiotic order of execution (cause you enter a field before exiting the pervious one don’t you dimwits.) and the required order of input on the form, notes presented the wrong field on first click.

This ruined the functionality. So lets try plan B. Lets discard the dialogList type fields and do it all in script. Good idea and this has got me out of sticky situations before. Not this time, of all the things to not include in your implementation of an address picker why pick the ability to define default values? I’ve ended up having to add the existing values onto any new ones in script and provide a separate clear button on my page to clear out the field.

IBM you are trying my patience. You can’t compete with the "big boys", if you haven’t even fixed the basics. Your 20 years down the line and have had 8 releases to get the basics iron clad. Instead you keep adding "Shiny things” hoping it will distract us from the stench of epic fail coming from the foundations.

In the first part of my how to guide (or more how i did it guide.)

I'll simply tell you how to set up the form to store using javascript the fields that have been changed. (hence the fields that need auto saving.)


var nextNum = 0;
var changedFields = new Array();
jQuery.noConflict();
jQuery(document).ready(function() {

jQuery('input').bind('change', function() {
    changedFields[nextNum] = this.name;
    nextNum++;
    
    jQuery(this).unbind('change');


});

jQuery('textarea').bind('change', function() {
    changedFields[nextNum] = this.name;
    nextNum++;
    
    jQuery(this).unbind('change');


});
jQuery('select').bind('change', function() {
    changedFields[nextNum] = this.name;
    nextNum++;
    
    jQuery(this).unbind('change');


});


});

The above code will add the name of each input, textarea and select that is changed to the array changedFields which the autosave function will use later. Warning tough certain third party add ons will not trigger an change event and must be dealt with seperatly i will show this for nic editor later in an advanced setup.