I am creating a page and the page has an editable data grid (I'm actually using jqgrid). The user can add, delete, and edit the rows of the grid. There are also some other form fields on this page such as text boxes and drop downs, but they are not part of the grid.
From a usability perspective which of the options do you think is best and why?
User manages the grid separately from the rest of the page. This means that there is a save button on the grid. So the user can save a grid row to the db without clicking the submit button. When the submit button gets clicked, the non-grid form fields get sent to the server.
user manages grid and other fields dependent upon each other. This is like an "Everything or nothing scenario." When you click the submit button, all of the form fields get submitted an saved the db along with the grid fields. If there is a validation error, nothing gets saved.
If there is a better way to handle this type of situation that I did not list, please let me know.
What I was thinking when I was in a similar situation, is how important it's that the user fills the other form fields. If they are optional and the grid is more important I would have the submit button in the grid but if I want the user to fill all the fields, the button should be at the end. In the case where the button saves the whole form, you can have a type of warning if the user skips some fields or you can have a deactivated button.
The second thing I thought was the height of the page. If the button hides 'above the fold' there is a high posibility that some users won't see it and the data won't be saved. So in that case, maybe you should have it in the grid. I would check analytics about screen resolutions.
Related
I was wondering if someone can give me a general guideline or example for the following. I have created a form with several input box fields. When a user inputs something, the field highlights it orange. When a user goes to another field, the highlight goes away and the new box gets highlighted. When the user hits "save" button, the form gets saved. When the user hits "modify" button, it allows them to change the values in the fields. However, this time I would like to have the highlighted box stay highlighted on all the fields that have been changed (and obviously the fields that are not touched remain not highlighted). Is there anyway someone can send me a tutorial or create a quick example to demonstrate this? I am using Angular 1.5 and used Bootstrap to create a simple form.
Thank you
You Can use $touched property to know whether user clicked on that particular form field.
Ex:
custFrom.inputName.$touched
To know actual value modification use $dirty in the same way
Ex:
custFrom.inputName.$dirty
Please find working plunker
I have a MS Access form that is bound to a query in the database. I added a textbox and added a row source to a Hyperlink datafield in the query. When I open the form, it won't allow me to drop a file into the textbox.
Here's the deal. When I follow this EXACT same process on a new form, it works perfectly. That is, I open a blank form and I bind the form to some new query, let's say qryNewIdeas. Then on the blank form i add a textbox, let's say Text0. Then, when I select Text0, I go to the data tab - row source and choose the dropdown arrow to select the hyperlink field, lets say NewIdeasAddress. I click SAVE and open the form. It works PERFECTLY.
BUT, when I repeat this on an existing form (the one where I need the thing to actually work), it does nothing. It adds and changes the textbox to a hyperlink box (I note this because of the blue underlined word that appears in the box). But it won't allow me to drop files to this location.
I tried commenting out ALL of my VBA code to try to make sure that something wasn't hindering it (say in an OnLoad event) AND I've checked all of the form and control box properties and they seem to be the same in both the existing form and the test form.
I can't determine why it works on one form and not the other; Solution needed.
If you have access to "the data tab - row source ..", you are in design view.
When you later open the form, you are in form view, a completely different animal which specifically prohibits design changes.
It sounds like you will have to rethink your concept.
Previously, I have seen web forms that are multiple pages long, but on each page, if the inputted information is invalid, it will cause an error and make the user fix their input.
However, I can't seem to find anything to show me how to do this. My form is 2 pages, with a Continue button at the bottom of the first and a Submit button at the bottom of the second. However, all possible errors generated will be on the first page, so I want it to show them if the user hits Continue when he has inputted errors.
Right now, the form is only processed after the user hits Submit and all the data is posted to the backend, which means it then has to go back to the first page to show the errors.
You could try to check the information every time the user continues to the next input control, and tell him that there's something wrong if he enters any nonsense.
How to achieve this depends on how your form looks:
Does it just contain and something like that or radio buttons and other "special elements"?
For you could check at the FocusLost event, but I don't exactly remember its syntax.
I am currently working on making my Flex application accessible.
I have an mx DataGrid that I am using for showing complex data. Each row contains information about a person and one of the columns contains a button to "submit" that person's information.
Currently if I tab to the DataGrid, it has focus on the whole thing, but I cannot tab to individual cells. For accessibility purposes, I need the user to be able to tab to each of these cells to read the information. Everywhere I've looked I've found that it seems the only way to focus on an individual cell is to set the editable property to true. However, I do not want to make the field editable, as that information should not be changed.
At the very least I would like to be able to tab to the cell that has the button ItemRendender for each person. I could set the rest of the information in the accessibilityName of that.
Is there any way to accomplish this? Or am I going to have to find a more "creative" solution?
In case anyone is wondering how to get around this, the only way I could find is to switch over to an AdvancedDataGrid. If you set the ADG's selectable property to true, you can use the arrow keys to select a whole row at a time, and the screen reader will read the whole row of information.
Then to get the effect of clicking the row's button, I set a keyboard event watcher that performs the function of the button using the target(ADG)'s selected item when you press space.
I have a form with multiple submit buttons, each of which is relevant to how the user wants the data saved and/or loaded.
The problem is (or was) that if a user pressed enter on the last (or any other) input within the form, the submit button that seemed to be called was the "load saved formed" which is at the top of the form. All attempts to user javascript to have the return button default to the "save form" seemed useless, almost as if the browser was too busy already submitting the form to have any js interfere.
Finally, in FireFox 3.5, I actually had the server-side script echo out what it received for the post variable and discovered that none of the submit button values were being passed back to the server. As it turns out, I have hooks in the script for when the user hits "Save" or "Save and Print", etc, but if the user uses the "load page" it simply updates a variable and continues loading the page normally with that variable in context.
So with no submit button value at all, it did the same thing, it simply loaded the page.
So, on to the big question:
Is this typical browser behavior? Maybe even reliable browser behavior? Will hitting enter always submit the form as though no submit button was pressed at all, or do some browsers like to pick a button to use as the default when the user presses enter?
If it is typical behavior, what is the suggested course of action? I was going to have the script save anything no matter what, so long as there was data in the form, but then I realized that this was even more dangerous, because if the user loads one saved form, changes there mind, and changes the form dates and hits "Load Form", then it will save the form data from the pervious form for the new dates they have requested.
I considered setting it up so that changing the load form inputs (selects with dates and other particulars) would clear the form so that the server still recieved an empty form and thus would not overwrite any previous data, but this is risky as well, as many users will certainly notice and think that their data has been lost, etc, and there is always the slight chance that the user will be almost done with the form, go up to the top and fiddle with the form-load selects just to confirm they chose the right what nots and then be forced to start from scratch.
I should just have two forms, one for loading, one for the data, but the problem with that is that all of the data in the load part of the form does get used by the main form. I could write more js to combine the two on submit, or hide the data in the second form, but all of that seems clunky.
Essentially, I need a setup such that the top part of the form is independent of the main form, but not vice versa. Submitting the upper form does not submit the lower, but submitting the lower does submit the higher.
Okay,I've gone on long enough. Basically I'm wondering if a solution already exists or if anyone else has run into this and found a clever fix. I thought simply having the form save whenever the form wasn't empty was pretty clever, until it occurred to me that when the user goes to the page, it auto-loads the most applicable form given the date, and thus changing the load variables will almost always caused trouble.
Having read the possible duplicate that Artelius was good enough to draw my attention to, I'm still unclear on the consistency across browsers regarding the Enter button as submit.
It seems that almost everyone in that question assumed that hitting enter presses the first available submit, which was also my assumption until a friend suggested I hide (via CSS) another submit button at the top of the form with whatever I wanted enter to achieve. It was when this got me the same results that I finally viewed what was being passed to the server (ie nothing in terms of a submit value). So that means either
a) the "enter as no submit button just submit" is new behavior for some or all browsers,
b) the "enter as just submit" vs "enter as first submit button" is just browser choice, no trends, just typical cross-browser unreliability, or
c) Everyone just keeps assuming that the "enter as first submit button" is the case because most of us only code if (situation1) else (assume not situation1) and none of us are really sure what the browser is doing.
I highly doubt it's that last one, but then again, I also highly doubt most of us know which browsers do which. I'd sure like it if there was a straight answer I could pass along.
Oh, and finally: While I know it would be far simpler to use buttons, and I am taking that under serious consideration, I would also like to consider other options, since really the only need for less submit buttons I have is for when users hit enter instead of one of the buttons.
Actually, let me get carried away one more second:
The only thing I really need to know is whether or not they hit enter FROM one of the text inputs. If I could pass that along to the server, I'd know if I should save or reload the form. But the problem is (or at least what I've had troubles with) is that when the user hits enter in an input, it seems like there isn't any more playtime with js to capture anything, and in some cases, it seems like the browser is triggering the onclick for whichever submit button and thus not really allowing me to know the real event that triggered that. I'll play around more with jquery, but has this behavior been observeed by anyone else?
My best advise would be to only have on submit button, and let that submit what ever is the most common usage of the form. Let the rest of the buttons just be normal buttons, which you can hook click events onto.
Just make sure you make it very clear which button will be "pressed" when the user hits enter. Let the submit button be the biggest one. If you have 3 buttons that are used equally as much, I would just drop having a submit button at all...
edit: I'm pretty sure most browsers will post all the data inside a form. If you want to do some checking on the data before posting you could add a listener for onsubmit
<form onsubmit="checkData(this);" ... >
Passing in this will let you check which form is actually being submitted:
function checkData(form) {
var formName = form.id;
//check all the data based on which form is being submitted
}
The HTML5 spec specifies synthetic click activation steps for implicit form submission:
A form element’s default button is the first Submit Button in tree order whose form owner is that form element.
If the user agent supports letting the user submit a form implicitly (for example, on some platforms hitting the "enter" key while a text field is focused implicitly submits the form), then doing so for a form whose default button has a defined activation behavior must cause the user agent to run synthetic click activation steps on that default button.