Using Tabbing inside a web form

[GigaG]

Is there a not so difficult way to have the ability to have tabbing for a web form? I have form that users will fill out and submit like a normal form, but the form has roughly 5 sections and is about 70 or 80 questions long... (Yes they actually fill all of it out). What my manager and I were thinking would be nice, is if we could have the ability to section off each "section" of the form into a tab view.

Is this possible?? I wasn't finding much in Google

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[vacunita]

It is possible, however Its not as simple as you may think,. You would probably need to use session{s to keep the filled in data, while moving around the tabs.

In other words, each time you changed a tab, you would be essentially submitting the information, and storing in a session variable or even a temporary table in your DB. once everything has been filled in, then you process it.


While it is possible and its not to difficult, it will take a bit of coding in the background to get it to work.



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[jpadie]

take a look at html quick form and its controller.

 

[GigaG]

Jpaide,
what do you mean by quick form?? I googled HTML quick form and got quick tutorials...

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[Foamcow]

You could simulate the tabs using CSS and javascript to show/hide tabs. That way, everything could be in a single form and you wouldn't need to store anything in a session.

It would be important to hide the tabs via javascript calls rather then by default CSS when the page loaded. This way you can be sure that if Javascript wasn't available the whole form would be shown.

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[jpadie]

You could simulate the tabs using CSS and javascript to show/hide tabs. That way, everything could be in a single form and you wouldn't need to store anything in a session.

that would work but would not allow the user to come back to the form (70 questions?) to complete over more than one session. Perhaps not a requirement, however.

@GigaG
quickForm is a pear package. as is the controller.
pear.php.net and search for HTML_QuickForm

there is a learning curve to its use, but it's shallow and the benefits of the quickform class are enormous. do not use the php5 variant yet - it's not ready. but the php4 variant works just fine in php5. i use my own renderer so as to avoid using table-based forms. but that's just preference.

 

[Foamcow]

That's true jpadie.
Perhaps a better option would be a combination?
Use Sessions to store the info for the entire form and use CSS/Javascript to create the tabs. The crux is there is a single form rather than a number of forms.

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