Disabled actions unless dirty inputs

[ahmed-rashad-alnaggar]

Hey @danharin 👋

I'd love to open a discussion around a feature idea: disabling form actions until the form is "dirty" — leveraging Livewire's built-in dirty tracking.

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💡 The Idea

Allow actions (e.g. Save, Submit) to be conditionally disabled until the user has actually made a change to the form.

I've already tested this on my own and it worked really well. The proposed signature would look something like:

Action::make('save')
    ->submitOnDirtyOnly()

Mirroring how Livewire's dirty tracking works, it could also accept two optional arguments — a condition and the IDs of target components to watch — so you can scope dirty-checking to specific fields:

Action::make('save')
    ->submitOnDirtyOnly(
        condition: true,
        only: ['title', 'body'],
    )

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⚙️ Implementation Approach

The implementation would use wire:dirty as the primary mechanism where it fits naturally. For cases where wire:dirty isn't applicable, it would fall back to Alpine's x-bind with $wire.$dirty(targets) — giving us the flexibility to handle both simple and advanced use cases cleanly:

<!-- Simple case -->
<button wire:dirty.attr="disabled" wire:target="data.title, data.body">Save</button>

<!-- Advanced / scoped case -->
<button x-bind:disabled="!$wire.$dirty(['data.title', 'data.body'])">Save</button>

This keeps the API consistent with how dirty tracking already behaves in the Livewire + Alpine ecosystem: https://livewire.laravel.com/docs/dirty

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✅ UX & UI Benefits

• Prevents accidental no-op submissions — users can't submit a form they haven't changed, reducing unnecessary server round-trips and database writes.
• Clear visual feedback — the disabled state signals to the user that there's nothing new to save yet, improving perceived form clarity.
• Encourages intentional interaction — once a field is edited, the button activates, giving a satisfying "ready to save" affordance.
• Reduces confusion — users often wonder "did I already save this?" — a disabled Save button while the form is pristine answers that implicitly.
• Aligns with native app patterns — macOS, iOS, and most well-designed web UIs already disable Save/Apply until a change is detected.

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Since this builds on top of mechanisms already present in the Livewire + Alpine stack, the implementation footprint should be small. Happy to make a PR if there's interest.

Would love to hear your thoughts!

[ahmed-rashad-alnaggar]

@danharrin Hmm, any thoughts?

[danharrin]

Hi, I think I am going to pass on this one, I imagine there are quite a few edge cases with complex field states like repeater and file upload, and it has not been requested by enough users to warrant that extra maintenance burden. Luckily it looks quite easy to implement with extraAttributes(), and you could even release a plugin with a macro that adds this.

[ahmed-rashad-alnaggar]

Thanks for the feedback!

Just a quick note — extraAttributes() alone isn't quite sufficient here. The disabled attribute on action buttons is enforced internally (via the button rendering trait), so passing it through extra attributes gets overridden.

I'll look into a proper approach that handles edge cases (repeater, file upload, etc.) without adding fragile maintenance surface, and will open a PR if I find something solid.

[danharrin]

I'm happy to accept a PR where disabled gets merged properly so that the extra attributes aren't overwritten.