EPub 3.0 and HTML Forms

Question

I am creating an epub3 with a form inside. Is it possible to save the information that was inputted in the form locally when the user is offline and send it to a web service if the user is online?

Answer 1

THIS is a good question! Finally...

OK, for the first part of your question (saving the information) you can use localstorage, for some great info on that go here: http://diveintohtml5.info/storage.html.

The next part of the answer is not quite so simple: ideally you could just use some sort of try catch with an XHR request, but chances are that won't work because most ePub3 readers (actually, pretty much all of them except Readium) don't support XHR or external request functionality. See this post for more info on that: http://beneaththeink.com/blog/who-supports-epub/.

If you want your book to be distributed through any of the "normal" channels (pretty much just iBooks since you need Script support at this point) you won't be able to send the data at this point in time...

However, if you will be distributing the book yourself for use on Readium and iBooks (or if you want to plan ahead and hope for support) there are a few hacks you can do. My personal favorite, is embedding the data in a media request (IE www.yoursite.com/fake.m4v?data1=localStorage.data1&data2=localStorage.data2) and pulling out the data on your server. This would be nested in a try catch and activated whenever the book is opened.

If you include the base url (www.yoursite.com) in the .opf file, as well as at some point in the chapter which contains the script, this will work in iBooks! If you don't include it in the .opf the request will get blocked right out of the gate... For more information on why this won't work in the actual iBookstore check out this post: http://beneaththeink.com/blog/external-video-in-ibooks-epub-files/.

Best of luck!!!