Automattic / Automattic/cortext

Don't lose a field edit when the tab closes

Open
#299 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
area: collections priority: low type: bug
Dominant language
JavaScript
Stars
51
Forks
2
Avg merge
3h 12m
Merged PRs (30d)
8

Description

If you edit a document property and close the tab within the 500ms save debounce, the edit can be lost. The field-save queue does flush on `beforeunload`, but it's an async apiFetch with no keepalive and no "leave site?" prompt, so the browser can cancel it mid-flight. Title and content don't have this problem; they go through the editor autosave that #294 already flushes and prompts on. Field edits left that path when they moved to apiFetch.

**Proposed solution:** shorten or drop the debounce, or mark the post dirty while a field save is in flight so #294's prompt picks it up. It goes away on its own once documents move to core-data (#298), so only worth doing if that's far off.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Start by tracing the field-save queue, its 500ms debounce, and the beforeunload apiFetch path, then compare it with the editor autosave behavior described in #294. Done means a field edit is not lost when the tab closes during saving, while title and content retain their existing flush and prompt behavior; check whether the planned move to core-data in #298 changes the scope.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
javascript
Domain
frontend
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
48/100

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