FormulasQuestion
Disable browser autocomplete for answer fields
Hello Philip,
Below is a Formulas question with 26 parts for each of the letters of the alphabet. The answers are of type "Algebraic formula" and the answers are in fact the name of variables (a small trick to circumvent the absence of string answers). The question behaviour is set to "Adaptative mode". I added some css to format the layout, among other things I hid the answer boxes information (answer type and interpretation of input).
Here is an unexpected behavior: when clicking in an empty answer box, previously checked answers are displayed below the answer box. This can indeed be useful to students. Did you add this feature or was it always there?
The XML file of the question is attached below.
Hello Jean-Michel,
Were you aware of this behaviour?
Adult Literacy Fundamental English - Shantel Ivits-Writing - Formulas-20221127-2042.txt
Sorry for the late reply. This is the browser's autocomplete feature, something most modern browsers offer. The suggestions are based on what one entered in "similar" fields during earlier browser sessions.
It might probably be a good idea to turn this off by setting the corresponding attribute to the text fields.
I am closing this issue, because the <form> enclosing the question's input fields now already has the autocomplete="off" attribute set. According to MDN this
tells the browser not to save data inputted by the user for later autocompletion on similar forms (some browsers make exceptions for special cases, such as prompting users to save passwords).
If the browser does not follow that setting, it won't make a difference if we additionally set the same attribute to each of our input fields in the renderer, so there is not more we can do AFAICS.
Note: The browser might still have values saved from earlier versions or other forms. In that case they might still show up unless the corresponding data is cleared via the browser settings. But at least, no new data will be collected for autocompletion.
I reopened this issue and assigned it a "Priority: low" label. This is not an urgent issue, but it might have a solution — possibly on the client side. See, for example: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65504515/. For now, I haven’t looked closely into possible solutions.