I have a form with almost 60 controls on it and the client wants all that information to be fillable on one form, because all that is related to one document. Are there some usable patterns to do that? Some ways of dealing with such problem i see:
- put many controls on one page with vertical/horizontal scrolling(for example i hate scrolling, dont think that decision is suitable).
- create tab pages for sections. But here is a small problem: the sections are not really there, because all information is related to one thing..Tho still i can create some sections, but must save/validate all tab pages at once.
Please suggest some common practices for such problems.
Well, my app has forms with far more than that on and so I feel your pain.
I would avoid scroll bars. It’s much harder for the user to be sure that they have seen everything when you have scroll bars.
I’d recommend page controls (i.e. tabs). I’m sure if you try hard enough you’ll find some sort of grouping that makes sense.
The other approach you sometimes see used which is similar to a page control is pages but with Next/Back buttons. The problem with this is that it is needlessly linear.
It’s harder to advise on validation. If the validation only depends on the value of the single value in question, then validate on entry. Consider using colour highlighting rather than dialog boxes. Only show hard fail dialogs when the user tries to dismiss the dialog.
Validation for values whose validity depend on other user input is harder. I’d postpone that to dialog dismiss time.