The autosave feature was something we never quite finished off, so I suspect there may be more work than adding a modal dialogue box to make it work reliably.

In regards to the modal dialogue box, we are currently getting this effect by using a litebox script. it would be good to be consistent with the interfaces. Either use the existing litebox, or if the benefits are large, replace it entirely with the one you've aware of.

the two main gripes i have with autosave in SS:
1. too slow, as it loads a completely new page in an iframe. to be useful, it has to appear instanteous
2. opt-out: by default, all fields are captured by autosave, which means you can trigger it by changing a hidden field or something thats not actually content. you have to specifically exclude fields from the autosave detection.
the underlying code is pretty solid, but it needs some "usability-refactoring" IMO

I'm currently working on Usability Issue "#44 Alert users when leaving tab with unsaved changes": http://www.elijahlofgren.com/silverstripe/alert-users-when-leaving-tab-with-unsaved-changes/

It states: "Make sure there is always a ‘Do you wish to save your changes’ reminder if users have made changes and try to leave a tab without clicking the ‘Save’ button."

For example, renaming a folder in the 'Files and Images' section and clicking 'Newsletters' does not bring a confirmation or save the new folder name. This is one thing that I will work on fixing.

> 1. too slow, as it loads a completely new page in an iframe. to be useful, it has to appear instanteous

I too have noticed the slowness of the confirmation. Should I add making the confirmation load faster to my list of things to fix for Usability Issue #44?

> 2. opt-out: by default, all fields are captured by autosave, which means you can trigger it by changing a hidden field or something thats not actually content. you have to specifically exclude fields from the autosave detection.

Should I also work on implementing opt-in instead of opt-out for fields as part of my work on the Save reminders usability issue?

Thanks for the feedback,

Elijah

The problem with a "modal plugin" is that the modal dialog has to halt the unloading of the page - I suspect that no modal plugin on earth actually has this ability, arrongantly based on the fact that I couldn't work out how to do it :-P

To be honest, this combined with Ingo's gripes about load time makes me wonder if we shouldn't just to it the same way as Google Docs - an ok/cancel box that says "do you really want to leave without saving your changes?" and if they don't, forces people to press cancel and then save manually.

I agree with Ingo that opt-out is the only acceptable solution here: The ease adding of custom fields to pages is a massive benefit of developing with SilverStripe, and we don't want to complicate with gotchas such as this.

9 times out of 10, you want change detection on a field. The other 1 time, you're going to be deep enough into things to know that you should be disabling change detection. What we do need, however, is a documented way of opting out.