Timeout options

[rmorgan]

I would like to get some options for pages timing out. I have a form that is used to enter information for broadcast emails. 98% of the time everything is ok, but there are times when the user takes what I think is an exceptionally long time to go through the form and complete. I have the form timing out after 90 minutes. I have my own opinions about this, but I promised I would look for other options that I may not be aware of or thought about.So here I am.

Personally I am of the opinion that 90 minutes is more than enough time to fill out and complete the form. In these cases where it does timeout on them the common reason is that they were interrupted and when they came back, everything had reset. I am of the opinion that if they start filling this form out, everything else waits, and they just need to tell others that they are in the middle of something and they need to wait a few minutes. I am open to some changes, but I dont want re-invent my tool just because some people are impatient. I would just like to get some ideas on what can be done if anything about those users that get "interrupted" and come back later to find that all the information they had already entered is gone. TIA

[craigkaminsky]

My sense is that the timeout you're talking about is for a session (as opposed to a general application timeout). If this is the case and you're using ColdFusion 7 or 8 with an Application.cfc file, you can take advantage of the onSessionEnd method in Application.cfc.

Furthering this approach, when the session ends and the onSessionEnd method is fired, you could, in the body of that method, save the form data to a database table, XML file, etc., associating the form data with the customer (via cookie, username, or whatever fits your application).

Prior to the code in onSessionEnd executing, you need to ensure that the form data is saved in the session scope. There are a variety of ways to accomplish this. Off the top of my head, you could use an Ajax library (jQuery, Prototype, etc.) to bind a blur event to each form field, passing the value of the field, and perhaps the field name, to a server-side script (CFML or CFC) and storing that value in the session scope.

Good luck!