Avoiding too many submits to the page

I have an HTML page in which a table with innumerable no of cells are placed all over the page. In detail a employees 24 hour day schedule is divided into 30 min cell means 48 cells in row by 100 employees on average. Each cell on click opens a popup which on submit submits the whole page again.This is been in use since ages but a new client w开发者_C百科ants this should happen after all the random popups modfications are complete(means all changes should happen only once). This is mostly written in java,javascript with a custom framework.My qusetion is what is the dual approach for this kind of situation. Most generic answeres I researched is AJAX implementation but i feel some tweaking inside the javascript might fulfill the requirement.

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Without AJAX, the only solution I can think of is not submitting the form every time one value is changed, but having a "Save" button that saves them all at once.

However, AJAX would be the best solution. All you do then is submit a iny amount of data to the server and that is dealt with, all while the user stays on the current page.

Mozilla's tutorial is probably the best on the subject if you're using plain Javascript. The various frameworks like jQuery have really simple built-in functions.

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It's not absolutely necessary to use XML. A quick and dirty method for data for which you know the format and that is fairly similar is to just pass the data back and forth using the XMLHTTPRequest object. You could detect changes to individual cells with Javascript and events to store the cells that are modified and their new contents. Create the functions to pass the data back to a server page that updates the database.

This can be extremely fast. In one app I worked on, the HTML was 100k per refresh and this dropped to 5k or less when only the data was updated.

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AJAX would definitely be the best solution for that. But seeing as you're hesitant to do a rewrite, two ways of improving come to mind:

• Change the architecture of the table so that not every change requires a submit - it should be possible to change as many fields as necessary, and then save them all with one submit action. That depends on the table's structure, though, and the way the saving script works - a rework might be necessary, hard to tell without knowing more.

• Create an invisible IFRAME, give it a name, and set all <form> elements' target attribute to that IFRAME. There would still be a submit action for every pop-up, but it would be submitted into the invisible Iframe, while the page does not have to be reloaded, and the user can continue working. This not really a beautiful solution but might do the job, at least as long as there are no file uploads involved.