Autosave JS throws and error for post types with disabled title and editor

[karevn]

Steps to reproduce:

• Register a custom post type with title and editor disabled
• Create a post of that type
• Open the editor screen, wait for about a minute for autosave to try saving the post.

An error will be thrown because there is no post_datapost_title? set.

[MarcusPope]

I'm pretty sure this will never be true unless post_data["content"] is an array or custom js object with a namespace-trumping length property:

(post_data["content"] && post_data["content"].length == 0)

Instead we could just check for !post_data[xxx] on line 259:

if ( (!post_data["post_title"] && !post_data["content"]) || 
       post_data["post_title"] + post_data["content"] == autosaveLast ) {

Thanks,
Marcus

[azaozz]

All autosave cares about is the post_title and content. There's no point in trying to do a save if they don't exist, so setting doAutoSave = false; and skipping all the parts dealing with title or content should be enough.

[MarcusPope]

Replying to azaozz:

My fix is intended purely to prevent the JS error that is thrown when editor or title support are removed from a post - a fix of that nature should definitely happen regardless of autosave's purpose.

However I also think preventing autosave entirely because those fields were not enabled or because they are empty seems like a poor assumption - especially so with the advent of custom post types. Why shouldn't a custom post type be allowed to rely on the autosave functionality for custom meta properties it has implemented in a save_post action hook?

Ideally this code would be refactored entirely to check if each feature is enabled first before relying on empty post variables as a trigger to skip the autosave process.

But even outside of custom post types, it would still suck to write an entire blog post and lose all progress solely because you didn't populate the post's title first.

[MarcusPope]

Improved patch recommendation by Marcus Pope

[SergeyBiryukov]

One more patch: ticket:19390:19390.diff​

[azaozz]

Seems ticket:19390:19390.diff would work best for now. To extend autosave for CPTs and (perhaps) other instances of the editor we will need to refactor it.

[azaozz]

In [19476]:

Prevent error in autosave for CPTs without title or editor, props sorich87, fixes #18227