« Staff Development, Thursday, November 30, 2006 | Main | IE7 Security Warnings »
December 5, 2006
Validation of Form Data -- Striving for Perfection
In this blog entry, I continue my discussion of the validation of form data submitted to schedule a tutoring, proctoring or notetaking appointment. Since my last blog, I have made significant improvements to this whole process, as outlined below.
Location Field
With the likelihood that users will enter a location such as "APSC 401" for a tutoring session. I discovered in testing, as similar data was being passed via HTML, that everything to the right of and including the "space" was being deleted. I think I have fixed this by replacing the "space" with a dash ("-") using Oracle's instr and replace functions. I may make some improvements to the validation of this field at a later time.
Types of Tutoring Sessions for the Writing Center
Possible values for this field are "Tutoring" and "Brainstorming". This field is only being used by the Writing Center. As I am using the same form for all departments, I'm doing some testing to find out if the current department is indeed the Writing Center; if it is, then I'm calling the appropriate logic to validate this field.
Proctor and Notetaker Values for Office of Disability Services
This is a similar scenario as discussed above.
Data Entry for All Fields
I am requiring the user to complete all fields of the form. I have PL/SQL code in place to determine if a field has been completed when the user attempts to submit the form. In the future, I hope to improve this process with the use of Javascript.
Options to Submit and Reset the Form
After completing the form, the user will have an opportunity to preview and make changes to the data before submitting the appointment details. The record is added to the Calendar table when the user submits the form. At any time before the user clicks the final Submit button, they can reset the form, resulting in a new, blank form and discarding any previous data that had been entered.
Posted by goodeld at December 5, 2006 10:18 AM