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Posted by Jack Jackson on 06/17/54 11:22
Thanks everyone. I take the point of Andre, but believe that the depth
and sensitivity of the data require it be stored server side. I think
that Richard and Mark have put their fingers on it - it's gotta be
cookie based. Someone on the IRC suggested sessions and I think that it
the way it goes. As for the idea that new users would be sent packing by
such a ridiculously long form, right on! This is a form to be filled in
by a client of the company after they've hired to company to provide an
assessment of ther practices, so they'd expect a long form. But point taken
Thanks everyone for replying so quickly!
I'll come back when I botch the sessions and need help fixing!!
JJ
Richard Davey wrote:
> Hello André,
>
> Wednesday, July 27, 2005, 2:22:30 PM, you wrote:
>
> AM> That's not a very good idea. Imagine the user gets to the fourth
> AM> form and gets a cup of coffee, or goes out to lunch. By the time
> AM> he gets to the computer he might have lost the session, thus
> AM> having data on your DB that is wasting space.
>
> AM> And what if the user closes the browser window? :)
>
> All of those things are unavoidable no matter what technique you use
> :)
>
> I've seen multi-page forms with a "Finish this later" option that
> issues a cookie to your browser, allowing you to visit the site at any
> (realistic) point in the future and carry on. In which cases the
> part-filled contents must already be in a database somewhere. This
> isn't a bad thing imho, it's a nice touch.
>
> Of course it's prone to the usual "browser doesn't accept cookies /
> browser deletes cookies" syndrome though.
>
> If you don't want to pass the form values across in a hidden manner
> (and I don't blame you) then it's either dump it all in a session and
> hope it doesn't time-out, or dump it into a database, issue the
> visitor some link to that entry (cookie, session var) and again hope
> they don't time out.
>
> The only real difference being the DB option will need purging to get
> rid of incomplete forms > X days old. But that in itself could prove a
> useful statistic for reports. Unless you're dealing with thousands of
> sign-ups an hour, I don't see any issue with this option.
>
> Another technique might be the following - rethink how your forms
> work. Exactly what is it you're collecting data about? If it's part of
> a long sign-up process then you could consider changing the process
> around a bit - so that the VERY first thing the user does is create a
> temporary account on your site (call them "incomplete users"). So you
> grab some method of login + authentication details from them. Then the
> form pages following this can all be saved to a DB and linked to that
> user.
>
> So, as long as they complete this first step, they can always come
> back and finish the job off - whenever they want, avoiding cookie and
> session time-out issues.
>
> This won't work for all forms of course, it depends what the nature of
> the process is, but it's certainly an option.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Richard Davey
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