Creating a dynamic online form

[edprush]

I am planning to hire someone to create a dynamic online for for me to use in a website.
I'm looking for recommendations on what language/code this would be best created with.

I would like the form to be one page (scrollable) but also be able to collapse sections of the form. The form will start out with one 'section' with the option for the form-filler to add subsections to that section AS WELL AS create additional sections and additional input fields within each section/subsections.

The sections should be editable and deleteable.


I have been trying to find an existing form, oline, to give you an example of what I'm talking about but I can't find one.

In order to be the type of form I want, the image listed below would need to have an option, for example, for the form-filler to add more email address or more URLs. I know that I could have several empty fields but I would rather have a method to allow the form-filler to create new fields. For example, there might be a button that says, "add another URL". That button would then add the appropriate URL field for the form-filler to complete.

http://www.serverpro.com/image...searchenginesubmit.jpg

Any suggestions for me?

Thanks.

 

[Crusty]

Well, that front end stuff would have to all be done with Javascript, as far as the backend stuff goes PHP/mySQL or .NET/MSSQL.

 

[ahurtt]

This is a job for HTML!
And his faithful trusty sidekick, Javascript!

 

[esun]

Any language is sufficient (I've seen it done in PHP and I've done it myself in Perl). As others have said, it will require some Javascript knowledge. The most popular choice would probably be PHP, though really any server-side language will do.

 

[edprush]

Out of curiosity, would this type of dynamic online-form be possible with Flash?

Also, would there be any benefit to using ajax?

 

[esun]

The form itself could be in Flash, but I believe the server-side processing would still have to be Perl/PHP/Python/Ruby/ASP/etc. However, I'm not entirely familiar with Flash's capabilities, so I could be wrong here.

I don't see any benefit to using AJAX here. It would save you all of one page load (the submission), which really isn't much at all.

 

[jaynonymous]

As others have mentioned, what you're wanting is going to require a combination of Javascript and some server-side scripting. I prefer .NET over PHP or Java, but really any server-side language would work.

I'm no Flash expert, but this probably could be done in Flash, but I don't know what advantage you'd gain from doing so.

 

[Furor]

ColdFusion has excellent integration with flash forms. Adobe makes both coldfusion and flash...

 

[Gunslinger08]

I'd use ASP.NET and AJAX. Store your dynamically generated form in XML. A guy I know has developed something similar to this.