Question

i am writing a online text editor application, and i need to save data to mongo db every 3 minutes after last key press by user currently i am saving data after the textarea loses focus thats fine but i need to add more user friendly features so i need to add the above functionality but i cant figure out how to go about it i need a timer in jquery which can trigger the ajax call after 180 sec. Can anyone tell me which jquery function i can use to get the desired result. i am using on server side and mongo db as database.

Answer 1

window.setInterval(function() {
    $.ajax({...});
}, 180000);

---

However, I’d use an approach that only saves when necessary, and in this case more often. The following example uses functions from Underscore.js.

$('textarea').on('keyup', _.throttle(_.debounce(function() {
    $.ajax(...);
}, 2000), 60000));

This will save your data as soon as the user stops typing for at least 2 seconds, but not more than once every minute. Here’s a small example which saves every 2s after a modification every 10 seconds: http://jsfiddle.net/ThiefMaster/AagFC/