Question

I have a HTML form which can dynamically expand and can end up with 400+ input capable fields on it.
I would like to selectively decide which fields are posted when the form is submitted (Not by AJAX) so that only fields where the values have changed are submitted.

I know that only input fields that have a name attribute are actually posted so my idea is to take each element Id (that has changed) and add a name attribute using JQuery like so:-

$(‘#field1’).attr(‘name’, ‘field1’);

This would be just before the submit and so (in theory) only the fields that have changed are submitted.

I have trawled through Google looking for examples that do this but suprisingly can’t find any examples anywhere. The closest I have seen is someone mentioning to disable fields before Submit.

So my questions are:-
Will this idea work?
If so, are there any negative reasons for using this approach?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Answer 1

$('input').change(function(){
  var newName = $(this).attr("id"); //could use any attribute, maybe data-name
  $(this).attr("name", newName);
})

When any input field has changed, the id gets added to field as its name.

For the general desgin issue, I would probably submit the whole form, and only update changed fields server side – it would actually be handled by hibernate in my case.