Question

Say you retrieve 100 records, and display them on a page. The user only updates 2 of the records on the page. Now you want to update only the two records, and not the other 98.

Is it best to have one submit on the page, then somehow know which 2 are updated, then send only those two to the db for an update?

What does the ‘somehow’ look like?

Or, would you have an update-submit button for each row, and have it only update the record its tied to?

Answer 1

Of course there are different ways you could do this. In general, you can save yourself some trouble and server-side processing by using Javascript to assemble your POST data for only the records that have changed. Two thoughts on how this might work:

1) Go the ajax route and do live-editing. So records are presented in a table and appear to be non-editable. When a user clicks a particular row, that row becomes editable by using Javascript to create the appropriate html form on the fly. Then have either a submit button or some other handler (say, moving focus to another table row) which will trigger the POST which updates the DB (asynchronously via your preferred ajax method). Happily the mainstream Javascript frameworks can help a lot in this area.

2) Checkboxes – whenever a row is edited, its checkbox becomes checked. When the submit button is clicked, use javascript to post the POST data by grabbing everything in row whose checkbox is checked. A user can un-check a box to cancel changes to that row before submitting.