TinyMCE autosave plugin and localStorage

Question

By default, TinyMCE's autosave plugin stores the editor's text in localStorage. Is there a way to tell it to use a different storage engine? Ultimately what I want to do is set up a listener on the storeDraft event so I can persist the contents to our server so the user can access the contents even after the autosave_retention limit has been surpassed. I know that I can set the autosave_rentention to 0 but even when I do I can see that it still writes the data to localStorage -- it just removes it (though, sometimes not immediately and it seems like a page reload short circuits that in some cases).

So basically, I'd like to hit 2 birds with one stone. I'd like to stop TinyMCE from storing the data in localStorage and, if I can specify a different "data store", then perhaps I can point it to my ajax handler which will persist to the back end.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

thnx,
Christoph

Michael Fromin Michael Fromin · Accepted Answer · 2019-07-12T14:37:28

The autosave plugin is designed to work with local storage and has no option to change to a different storage mechanism. If you want to store the data on your server you would typically that with some custom code that uses either (a) TinyMCE events or (b) a timer to get the editor's current content and then send it to the server.

If you want to use TinyMCE events (https://www.tiny.cloud/docs/advanced/events/#editorevents) to trigger this process you would have code along these lines:

tinymce.init({
    selector: "textarea",
    ...
    setup: function (editor) {
      editor.on('init change NodeChange Dirty', function (e) {
        // 1. use getContent() to extract the editor's current HTML 
        // 2. send the HTML to your server
      });
    }
});

If you want to use a basic timer (e.g. setTimeout()) you would use that to trigger the same two actions as the sample code above.

In theory you could modify the autosave plugin to send data to your server as opposed to storing the data in local storage but I think you can do what you need in a far simpler way without needing to dig into the ~200 lines of code in the existing plugin.

TinyMCE autosave plugin and localStorage

1 Answers