In our deployment, we’re using Inline Action Forms to implement questionnaires that clinicians need to fill out. These forms tend to be quite long, with many text parameters and corresponding text areas for input.
Right now, user input is only saved when the action is explicitly submitted. However, since filling out these forms can take a while, we’ve run into issues where users lose their progress—usually because they get interrupted and forget to submit.
Is there any creative way to configure the Inline Action Form to autosave inputs as users type, without requiring them to explicitly submit the action?
The inline action form doesn’t offer any autosave functionality. I will add this signal to an internal request tracking this.
You could explore slightly modified workflows like splitting up one longer form into several steps which are submitted more frequently.
You could also explore setting up a “save” functionality into your ontology with something like a “DraftFormState” object type where all fields are optional. A user could “Save” this action at any point, and you could have a separate action which takes a configured draft state as default values and allows a user to submit the draft state once valid. One downside of that approach is that I think the user would always need to first save the draft before being able to submit the form values.