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Loosing FORM data before submit

Posted: Wed Nov 23, 2005 9:50 pm
by alex.barylski
Has this ever happened to you?

What I mean is...have you ever filled out a form (lengthly to boot) only to have accidentally clicked on a link somewhere inside the form or else where only to click "back" and find you would have to completely re-enter all the information you just entered???

Ever had a customer request you somehow prevent a user from navigating away from a web page when their in the process of filling out a FORM???

What can be done?

Ideas???

Posted: Thu Nov 24, 2005 4:53 am
by Jenk
Some registration forms annoy me.. particularly when you submit, then it tells you that the username your requested is already in use, but it has cleared the entire form :(

I just walk away from sites if they do that.

Posted: Thu Nov 24, 2005 8:26 am
by twigletmac
We've had an angry e-mail in the past when someone saved (to his local computer) the form page to continue filling it in later and then of course it wouldn't submit and he lost his data. That was a fun one to deal with.

I don't see how you could prevent someone from navigating away without annoying a bunch of people. Just need to build as much as possible into the form to stop it clearing if they accidentally submit early. Some of the irritating form clearing behaviour is browser dependent unforunately, maybe you can add in some Javascript to ask 'are you sure you want to do this?' so they don't lose stuff by accident.

Mac