Serious Multipage Form Problem

[sagelike]

I've been trying to setup a new multipage form and it's a disaster from the word go. I've used formtools for a few years and it's antoday awesome piece of software but it's completely frustrated today.

I keep getting stuck at Step 5, Field Type.

I get this error:

There were multiple fields that couldn't be found in the form pages you specified. This is mostly likely caused by one of these:

I've tried resinstalling the form and tweaking about 10 times and every time the Smartfill failed on Step 5. I removed the spaces between field names (after I discovered that Formtools replaces them with an underscore), removed some field validation, changed the form owner to administrator, added the print to screen line and just tweaked and fiddled.

I finally gave up and manually selected field types for more than 200 fields. I thought at last, salvation. It must work now.

Once I completed the type selections and returned to the field list with "resolved" nest to each field, I clicked Next Step and nothing, nada, zip. It's not going anywhere. I tried "skip step" and still nothing. It's just stuck so I had to refresh and now Skipping and going to Next Step anyways just gets me an endless spining progress wheel. Sigh...

I assume I can't use standard form setup method instead of the API method on a multipage form?

Any help would really be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
G

[Ben]

Hi sagelike,

Sorry you're having trouble!

I removed the spaces between field names (after I discovered that Formtools replaces them with an underscore)

Good! Yeah, name attributes for form names cannot legally have spaces in them; server-side languages (PHP, at least) converts spaces to underscores; hence this is why that's happening.

Could you post the HTML contents of your page? If it's sensitive, feel free to email it to me at ben.keen@gmail.com.

That error message hasn't led me astray yet: it really does just mean that you have multiple fields with the same name attribute (other than radio and checkbox groups). But it not impossible it's a rare bug!

- Ben

[sagelike]

Hi sagelike,

Sorry you're having trouble!

I removed the spaces between field names (after I discovered that Formtools replaces them with an underscore)

Good! Yeah, name attributes for form names cannot legally have spaces in them; server-side languages (PHP, at least) converts spaces to underscores; hence this is why that's happening.

Could you post the HTML contents of your page? If it's sensitive, feel free to email it to me at ben.keen@gmail.com.

That error message hasn't led me astray yet: it really does just mean that you have multiple fields with the same name attribute (other than radio and checkbox groups). But it not impossible it's a rare bug!

- Ben

Hi Ben

By 'same name attributes' do you mean duplicate field names?

thanks
Glenn

[Ben]

Hey Glenn,

Yes, exactly! When an HTML form is submitted to the server, the information being passed it a hash of
"field_name1" => "value",
"field_name2" => "value",
"field_name3" => "value",
...

So if you had this:

Code:

<input type="text" name="person1" value="Bob" />
<input type="text" name="person2" value="Tom" />

This info would be send:
"person1" => "Bob",
"person2" => "Tom"

But if THIS was in your form:

Code:

<input type="text" name="person" value="Bob" />
<input type="text" name="person" value="Tom" />

Only this would be sent:
"person" => "Tom"

(Because the first field with the "person" name attribute was overwritten).

For checkbox groups and multi-select fields, you can submit multiple values for the same field name by appending a "[]" to the end of the name attribute. e.g.:

Code:

<input type="checkbox" value="people[]" value="Bob" checked />
<input type="checkbox" value="people[]" value="Tom" checked />
<input type="checkbox" value="people[]" value="Jim" checked />

Then the server would receive this:
"people" => ("Bob", "Tom", "Jim")

Anyway, when parsing your form on step 5, Form Tools looks at all fields in the form and checks for fields with duplicate names. If there's more than one, it gets confused and doesn't know how to handle it - so it just lets you know via that message you posted.

All the best -

Ben

[sagelike]

Now I know what to look for. It's a huge form - more than 200 fields - so I probably have a hard to find duplicate somewhere.

Now that would be a nice feature. Duplicate field detection and where to find it

Thanks for your help Ben.