Posted by trlists on 02/09/05 17:38

I have a form which is too long to be useful displayed on one page. I
have it broken up into 7 sections. All 7 are generated by the same PHP
source file, from data in a database.

When the user updates a section they can submit it and go to the next
section, or submit it and finish (return to a higher-level page).
There is also a navigation form at the top that lets them jump from any
section to any other, and uses JavaScript to prompt if they try to jump
without having saved changes they made to the page. All of this is
working fine.

What's bothering me here is that when the user is done editing the data
I use their input to regenerate a style sheet (the form allows them to
customize the appearance of a web page for their customers). That's
expensive -- relatively speaking -- in server load so I'd rather do it
only once, when they're really done. But right now I do it every time
they submit any page -- i.e. whenever any of the seven pages is
submitted, the generation code runs. I don't see any simple way to let
them jump around between pages, yet for me to know when they are truly
finished with all the data. Of course I can give the required
instructions -- "after you are done you have to click submit to save
all the data" but I bet that those won't be read and the users will
jump around, fail to save, and then complain that their changes are
getting lost.

Any thoughts on the design issues here?

Thanks,

--
Tom

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