As you might have heard, DasBlog 1.9 is almost out and with it comes a pretty nifty feature - the ability to autosave drafts of your blog posts!  

I really didn't want to come out and say this publically, but Scott Hanselman is a liar.  Steven Rockarts and I actually had nothing to do with the autosave feature.   I've been under a lot of pressure to reveal the *true* authors of the autosave code and tell their story...the guilt has been too much for me, and so I'm coming clean.  I hinted at their identities in my last Dasblog post on previousEntry and nextEntry, but now I am just coming out and saying it so that no matter what Scott says, *you* know the real story.

Without further adieu, the Dasblog autosave team:  Denzel Washington, Spider-Man, and Jesus Christ!!!


Denzel and Spider-Man start with the page that has our textbox edit control in question: EditEntry.ascx.  They make two changes here.

1) Adding a label underneath the textbox control in EditEntry.ascx named AutoSaveLabel (this comes into play later).
2) Adding a new method in the code-behind called SetupAutoSave().  SetupAutoSave uses a StringBuilder to write a block of Javascript to the EditEntry page, consisting of 3 different functions:

• StartInterval() - sets a timer to call AutosaveTimer() once a minute.
• AutosaveTimer() - this is where the "heavy lifting" happens (detailed later).  
• AutoSaveResult() - this is our callback function, which will activate on the completion of the Fetch() call of the AjaxDelegate.  The only thing this does is output a message to the AutoSaveLabel.

To save an entry, they need the following information:

• The text of the post (obviously)
• The ID of the post (needed to use the DataService SaveData() in DasBlog).
• The author of the post
• The title of the entry

To get at the values of the textbox controls for Title and post text in Javascript, they write the following:

sb.AppendFormat("var editTextBox = document.getElementById('{0}');", this.editControl.Control.ClientID);
sb.AppendFormat("var titleBox = document.getElementById('{0}');", this.entryTitle.ClientID);

                
This then ensures that the javascript variables for editTextBox and titleBox refer to those controls.  

At the tail end of the code, they create a new AjaxDelegate that takes the arguments we've listed above, and a couple of others:
* the url we're going to hit asynchronously (in this case, "AutoSaveEntry.ashx")
* our callback function

At this point, things got a little ugly...