Yesterday I had to build a form for a new web site. But this wasn't the usual form with a handful of fields and a couple of required elements.
Oh no! This client required a form with almost 200 fields (194 to be exact), each field required validation, and there shouldn't be a single table element anywhere in the form.
Some fields are drop downs selects, others radio boxes or check box groups and some are even conditional dependant on previous answers.
The validation wasn't simple either, checking for the existance of an answer was not sufficient. There are date fields that require the answer to be within a set time period, numeric fields that have to be valid VAT codes and credit card numbers. And just for good measure there are even fileds that have to match some very complex regular expressions.
In order to not scare off the user with an enormous form there are even groups of fields that are conditionaly displayed based on the answer to previous fields. The form layout is fully CSS based and all the fields are correctly labelled and tab-ordered for accessibility.
Once validated the form is processed in multiple ways. Aside from the obvious "thank you" message and emailed submission the data is stored in a database, custom php code is executed to integrate with another application and dependant on the submission different people recieve notifications and custom data.
I won't tell a lie and say that creating this form was easy or that it only took 5 minutes, it wasn't and it didn't.
I would really love to share this form with you but it is locked off behond the corporate firewall of a Fortune 500 company but if you want to know how to create a complex form like this for your joomla powered web site head over to http://www.joomla-forms.com and try the demo for yourself.
