I am working on a web form for a client and they would like it to be expandable.

The best way to explain it is this:

Each form will contain billing/contact information and service request information. The service request section is for telecomm additions, modifications, and removals of service. The main problems with the old forms is that you had to submit one request for each, well, request. You could not submit multiple jobs from one form with the same billing and contact information.

So what I would like to do is make the form and associated HTML in perl with CGI.pm. So we have the form start out with a default number of request sections (each one containing checkboxes, textfields, whatever) and the number of those request sections is expandable by the user(to be duplicated precisely each time one or more is added). Perhaps there is a text field which they can add a number to and have that modify the form(suggestings on a good way to expand the form are also welcome, I have ideas but there might be something simpler I am missing).

So say we start out with something like this:

My Great Form!

• Contact Information
• Billing Information
• Request

I want to be able to expand it to something like this on the fly:

My Great Form!

• Contact Information
• Billing Information
• Request #1
• ...
• Request #N

Great. So the form is expandable.

My questions surrounding this are these:

• What happens to the data they have already entered into the form? Is there an easy way to repopulate this information into the form fields and expand the form at the same time?
• How do I (do I need to?) track multiple requests within the form since they will, presumably, have the same name values in the form? Am I going to have problems stomping on variables or should I just rely on the QUERY_STRING and read it in order?

Are there other sources people would recommend or are they techniques anyone here has used to deal with similar issues? I checked Q&A but I didn't find much in the way of helpful information (although Ovid's CGI Course has been quite informative about what /not/ to do).

As always, any advice is much appretiated.

_____________________
mjn

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