save vs form submit

[alan-stokes]

there is a possibility to not need to have a save / submit button, but instead, have it dynamically save each entry. allowing a more..... intuitive UI. but it does mean adding a bit more boiler plate, as ya would need to have debouches and subscriptions to changes to ensure we don't bombard the database withe very character.

[pahjbo]

we are using https://github.com/tanstack/query which might offer some facilities for enabling dynamic saving without bombarding the database

[alan-stokes]

have never come across this, so ill need to allocate time to read up on this at some point.

[DJWalker42]

If we implement this we just have to be aware that some of the fields in the database have non-null constraints meaning some of the objects we want to persist cannot be fully null, and there's also the semantics of objects being referred to by other objects or being contained by other objects. But it is currently 6pm on a Friday evening so my brain might be frazzled.

[alan-stokes]

no worries @DJWalker42 my brain been fuzzed all week from this cold. The concern about fully null disappears when we ensure all objects have a default value. the only issue with these is where none null means something semantically. aka a submission time not being null means it was submitted at some point kinda mentality. but what ive found, is usually that can be resolved by comparing to empty strings.

the main benifit of this, is then you dont need to worry about nulls anywhere.