Submitting Multiple HTML Forms

JQ Johnson jqj at darkwing.uoregon.edu
Fri Aug 14 13:23:56 EDT 1998


Timon.P.Tesar at am.pnu.com asks about HTML form submissions:
> ... much of the data in the form is the same. After 
> clicking on the submit button, a confirmation page appears. 
> Unfortunately, if the user then clicks on the browser Back
> button to return to the form, all the data they previously
> entered is gone and they have to type everything all over
> again 
Julie James notes
> We had the same concern and ended up doing a form that has the
> user information at the top, then space for 4 separate requests
> below.

Another common solution is to generate a confirmation page that
is itself another copy of the submission form, with (some) fields 
initialized based on what the patron typed on the previous form.
Depending on the particular application, the list approach suggested
by James may be a preferable user interface, but it doesn't work as
well if you expect a patron to submit a large number of requests.

JQ Johnson                      Office: 115F Knight Library
Academic Education Coordinator  mailto:jqj at darkwing.uoregon.edu
1299 University of Oregon       phone: 1-541-346-1746; -3485 fax
Eugene, OR  97403-1299          http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~jqj/


More information about the Web4lib mailing list