Ideas needed for turning a 9 page form in to a web form

[eatmypiano]

I've got a 9 page form as a MS Word document which people fill in a mail around the company. The process itself is prone to failure (people being on holiday and so on) and updates to the form cause all kinds of headaches...

I want to put the form on line and design a process around it. This bit I don't have problems with. The bit I'm stuggling with is the presentation of the form on line.

Obviously, a 9 page document makes a very long web page. Very long. Even with clever use of radio buttons and pop up menus, it's a stupid length.

I'd like to simplify this by splitting the form in to sections (again, I can do this bit) so there's a navigation bar down the side: Customer, Product 1 config, Product 2 config and so on.

The bit I'm having problems with is implementing the usage of this form. I'd like the user to be able to go to any page in the form and make a change but for this change NOT to be written to the underlying database until the "Submit Changes" button is clicked. So, they could go to page 2 and change something and then go to page 7 and change something. When they click back to page 2 the change they made is still visible, but if they click "Cancel Update" neither change is written to the database. Similarly, if they change something on page 2, this change is not written to the database, they go to page 7 and change something and realise that the change on page 2 means something else needs changing so they go back to page 2 and see their original change, change the other thing and then click "Submit Changes" - at that point all the changes are written to the database.

Sorry if I waffled a bit. Hopefully this makes sense. Does anyone have a suggestion on how I can implement this?

Thanks

Steve

[vaaaska]

Store it all the data in a session or a cookie. Or many of them. Or, add it all to the table and only when they submit the final button then indicate in the table that they have finalized their submission.

[Gonwee]

Store it all into a session. Then when they hit submit changes you can take the data out of the session and store it into the database.

[madwormer2]

I'd use a bit of javascript to "switch between pages" that's just toggling visibility on the different <div> tags.

That way it's all in one form.

But I favour not having to leave a page to perform additional actions, however, some people may not.

[vaaaska]

I'll second the javascript approach...typically this is how I do it. But I thought perhaps 9 pages might be a bit too much for this approach.

[Shrike]

Theres a PEAR package called Html_Quickform_Controller which can be used to manage several Html_Quickforms in a wizard style. You might find it useful.

[sonjay]

I feel compelled to jump in here and ask if you're sure that's the best approach?

I would expect you might see a lot of users making a lot of changes in their forms, and thinking that when they go from one section to another the changes get saved -- and thus neglecting to click the "Submit Changes" button when they're done.

Maybe that won't be a problem, but it would concern me if I were developing that form.