That's what I do on some forms... but imagine a forum where you get a big textbox to write in your info. If you don't get all the info you want written within 30 minutes, you're outta luck. I have one forum that lets users submit a story. Some of the users have been getting half-way through and then the variables expire and when they post, they lose everything they have been working on. Now that can be a pain. I just need to hold on to the user variables while they are on that particular forms page. It isn't a matter of how many input fields there are, it's how long does it take the user to fill out a box...
_____ From: Roland Dumas [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, July 22, 2009 12:07 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Witango-Talk: Expired Variables and Forms how come you don't parse the form into smaller sets of fields and just accumulate the responses in user scope, and then submit it all at the end? I had much better user experience by having one question/form and letting the user tick through the questions with a "you are at 3 of 20" kind of message with each. On Jul 17, 2009, at 12:05 PM, WebDude wrote: I have always had a problem with long forms and having user info expire before the forms were filled. I have done long forms in sections with a submit for every page. I have done timed javascripts that calls a pop-up after 25 minutes telling the user to save and continue. Yada Yada Yada. I am in the middle of putting together a very long form for a client and decided to try a different approach. I load a taf into an iframe with height and width attributes set to 1. The taf doesn't return anything, it's just a header with a meta-refresh every 25 minutes (1500 seconds). Now call me dumb, but this works perfectly, as far as I can tell. I've tested it on many forms, forums, in-house blogs, etc., and I cannot get it to break. Every refresh refreshes the variables and holds onto all the user info. A really simple solution to what I thought was a vexing problem. I just updated a bunch of stuff by adding the iframe at the bottom of a bunch of form pages. I cannot find any drawbacks to this... I hope I am not missing something. ________________________________________________________________________ TO UNSUBSCRIBE: Go to http://www.witango.com/developer/maillist.taf ________________________________________________________________________ TO UNSUBSCRIBE: Go to http://www.witango.com/developer/maillist.taf ________________________________________________________________________ TO UNSUBSCRIBE: Go to http://www.witango.com/developer/maillist.taf
