How to access old and new values before submitting with jeditable - jeditable

Question

I have a field being updated by jeditable. I want to output a warning message before submitting updates if the value is being reduced (which would result in data being lost), but not if it's being increased.
This seems a good candidate for jeditable's onsubmit function, which I can trigger happily. I can get the new value from $('input', this).val(), but how do I get the original value to which to compare it in this context?
...
Since posting the above explanation / question, I've come up with a solution of sorts. By changing the invokation in jquery.ready from
$('#foo').editable(...);
to
$('#foo').hover(function(){
var old_value = $(this).text();
$(this).editable('ajax.php', {
submitdata {'old_value':old_value}
});
});
I can use settings.submitdata.old_value in the onsubmit method.
But there surely has to be a better way? jeditable must still have the old value tucked away somewhere in order to be able to revert it. So the question becomes how can I access that from the onsubmit function?
Many thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Answer 1

A much easier solution would be to add this line to your submitdata variable
"submitdata": function (value, settings) {
return {
"origValue": this.revert
};
}

Answer 2

Here is my editable (it is using the submitEdit function):
$(function () {
$('.editable').editable(submitEdit, {
indicator: '<img src="content/images/busy.gif">',
tooltip: '#Html.Resource("Strings,edit")',
cancel: '#Html.Resource("Strings,cancel")',
submit: '#Html.Resource("Strings,ok")',
event: 'edit'
});
/* Find and trigger "edit" event on correct Jeditable instance. */
$(".edit_trigger").bind("click", function () {
$(this).parent().prev().trigger("edit");
});
});
In submitEdit origvalue is the original value before the edit
function submitEdit(value, settings) {
var edits = new Object();
var origvalue = this.revert;
var textbox = this;
var result = value;
// sb experiment
var form = $(this).parents('form:first');
// end experiment
edits["field"] = form.find('input[name="field"]').val();
edits["value"] = value;
var returned = $.ajax({
url: '#Url.Action("AjaxUpdate")',
type: "POST",
data: edits,
dataType: "json",
complete: function (xhr, textStatus) {
// sever returned error?
// ajax failed?
if (textStatus != "success") {
$(textbox).html(origvalue);
alert('Request failed');
return;
}
var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(xhr.responseText);
if (obj != null && obj.responseText != null) {
alert(obj.responseText);
$(textbox).html(origvalue);
}
}
});
return (result);
}