This post is all about saving you time by telling you where to best implement an auto-save capability on a SmartForm or editable view. An auto-save capability would mean removal of a Save button or toolbar button from the form in favor of Save rules being executed from some other rule, providing a seamless experience for the user.

If you’re like me, you might have been tempted to add some code to the save rule, or to create an unbound save rule. Let me save you some time: you want to add code to these three rules:

• When the View executed List item added
• When the View executed List item changed
• When the View executed List item removed

Very simply, after the line “apply the changes made to the row on the editable list,” add the action to execute the save rule. If you’re using a Save toolbar button, you might execute the When Save ToolBar Button is Clicked rule.

One downside to adding an auto-save capability is that the action has to be triggered by some kind of click, which I feel is clumsy. Left as-is, the user will have to single-click someplace else on the list to trigger the list item rules. One might consider eliminating that extra click through the addition of some change events on the add/edit row controls to trigger the list item rules.