How do i detect if the user is “idle” with javascript?

Question

I'm developing a "real-time" web application which sends AJAX requests to the server every 10 seconds. Obviously this is very bandwidth-intensive and I would like to know if there's any solution to this.

My idea is checking if the user doesn't move his mouse for X seconds. How can I accomplish this?

Answer 1

I think you're searching for this: https://github.com/jasonmcleod/jquery.idle

Answer 2

You may want to listen for some or all of the following events:

mouseMove, mouseClick, mouseUp, mouseDown, keyDown, keyUp, keyPress

set a timer to go off after some duration of idleness (60 seconds?) and that will turn off your switch make sure you check your switch before your ajax requests.

Ideally you'll exponentially throttle your ajax calls to some low value the longer a user remains idle.

$(window).bind('mousemove click mouseup mousedown keydown keypress keyup submit change mouseenter scroll resize dblclick', someEvent);
var active = true,
  delay = 60000,
  timer = null;

function someEvent(e)
{
  active = true;
  if (timer) clearTimeout(timer);
  timer = setTimeout(function(t){
    active = false;
  }, delay);
}

Answer 3

http://docs.jquery.com/Tutorials:Mouse_Position Hope that helps!

Answer 4

Here's another way: http://www.tek-tips.com/faqs.cfm?fid=2700
And using Jquery : http://www.bedroomlan.org/coding/detecting-%E2%80%98idle%E2%80%99-and-%E2%80%98away%E2%80%99-timeouts-javascript