How to access old and new values before submitting with jeditable

Question

I have a field being updated by jeditable. I want to output a warning message before submitting updates if the value is being reduced (which would result in data being lost), but not if it's being increased.

This seems a good candidate for jeditable's onsubmit function, which I can trigger happily. I can get the new value from $('input', this).val(), but how do I get the original value to which to compare it in this context?

...

Since posting the above explanation / question, I've come up with a solution of sorts. By changing the invokation in jquery.ready from

$('#foo').editable(...);

to

$('#foo').hover(function(){
  var old_value = $(this).text();
  $(this).editable('ajax.php', {
     submitdata {'old_value':old_value}
  });
});

I can use settings.submitdata.old_value in the onsubmit method.

But there surely has to be a better way? jeditable must still have the old value tucked away somewhere in order to be able to revert it. So the question becomes how can I access that from the onsubmit function?

Many thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Answer 1

Here is my editable (it is using the submitEdit function):

   $(function () {
        $('.editable').editable(submitEdit, {
            indicator: '<img src="content/images/busy.gif">',
            tooltip: '@Html.Resource("Strings,edit")',
            cancel: '@Html.Resource("Strings,cancel")',
            submit: '@Html.Resource("Strings,ok")',
            event: 'edit'
        });
        /* Find and trigger "edit" event on correct Jeditable instance. */
        $(".edit_trigger").bind("click", function () {
            $(this).parent().prev().trigger("edit");
        });
    });

In submitEdit origvalue is the original value before the edit

    function submitEdit(value, settings) {
        var edits = new Object();
        var origvalue = this.revert;
        var textbox = this;
        var result = value;

        // sb experiment
        var form = $(this).parents('form:first');
        // end experiment

        edits["field"] = form.find('input[name="field"]').val();
        edits["value"] = value;
        var returned = $.ajax({
            url: '@Url.Action("AjaxUpdate")',
            type: "POST",
            data: edits,
            dataType: "json",
            complete: function (xhr, textStatus) {
                // sever returned error?
                // ajax failed?
                if (textStatus != "success") {
                    $(textbox).html(origvalue);
                    alert('Request failed');
                    return;
                }

                var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(xhr.responseText);
                if (obj != null && obj.responseText != null) {
                    alert(obj.responseText);
                    $(textbox).html(origvalue);
                }
            }
        });
        return (result);
    }