: How to deal with multiple step forms where one of the forms are not submitted Say you have a submission process that requires two forms. The submission of the 2nd form triggers an email. What

@Sarah324

AS you describe, you should have a state of the process in your database to identify which steps have been completed..

Now, the next step depends on the technology used..

For ASP / ASP.NET there is an event triggered (server-side) when the session expires, and catching it you can perform the clean-up/auto-completion of the procedure..

Not sure if this is possible in PHP environments though .. i suppose you could store a timestamp once the 1st step is completed and a cron job will periodically run but first check against the timestamp to see if a set amount of time has passed before auto-completing ..

Vote Up Vote Down

@Angela700

It depends on why you are concerned about this.

If your concern is about having incomplete data in you DB I'd suggest just keeping the entered data in the user session until the user completes the second form and then update the DB and send the e-mail. If the user doesn't bother to fill out the second form, then the entire exchange will be forgotten once his session times out.

If your concern is about users failing to realize that they need to complete the second form you should strongly consider redesigning the forms (possibly merging them). This is a user interface issue.

Having a flag (as discussed in question) could help identify if this happens, but it wont tell you if it is happening through user error or simply because the user lost interest (unless you have a captive audience of some sort).

An alternative, if you can hook into when a user's session expires (this is fairly simple with Java sites, I'm not familiar with this feature in other server side technologies) you could check for incomplete transactions at that point.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Eichhorn148

Since HTTP is stateless, the only way to track whether a user has submitted the first form once the browser is closed is by using a persistence mechanism (e.g., a database) just as you have done.

However, you may run into a problem if users submit the first form and the cron job runs before they have a chance to submit the second form. You may want to also check that a certain amount of time has also passed.

Theoretically you could also try to detect when the browser is closing and use that event to trigger an action, but I advise strongly against it.

Vote Up Vote Down