I’ve been tasked with a small web flow. I need to ask a series of questions, then stop them or send them to a specified URL. I envision each line below shown by itself:
– Q1. If Yes goto URL, No goto Q2
– Q2. If Yes goto URL, No goto Q3-7
– Q3-7 Any Yes goto Stop page, all No goto Input page
– Input customer name, Next
– Print Preview – show all 7 Q&A, customer name and current date, let user print, then Next to final URL
So my questions are, should I have each of these be a separate JSP pages with a Form carrying the answers as hidden? Or should I put them all on one HTML page, and hide/display the questions using JavaScript (it would only appear they are moving page to page)? Either way I’ll use JavaScript to validate the questions.
This is an internal-use only thing, and no data is saved. It will be hosted on a Tomcat server with other Java apps running, so JSP’s are not a problem – I’m just wondering if its overkill.
I’d approach this issue from a maintenance standpoint. How often do you think there could be changes to the questions? If your boss calls you in and wants to see every Q in the app, printing one HTML page would be easy enough for him/her to do themselves.
If there was no saving of data, I would go one with the one page approach to keep it simple and easy to manage.