Designing Forms with an Indeterminate Number of Fields

[Sue Morgan]

Designing Forms with an Indeterminate Number of Fields

On a request form, the Service Team wants to allow the Requestor to input "1 to N" entries of one field type.  Not knowing "N" ahead of time, what is the recommended way for Service Designers to implement this (dictionaries and forms)? 

Example:  one of the NAS storage services is 'add new file system'.  Requestors specify which servers are allowed to access the new file system, and they can input "1 to N" servers.  What is a recommended design approach for this? 

My assumption would be to set some limit for N and then add that many fields to the dictionary and form.  For this example, perhaps the limit is 5.  The dictionary would have fields like: Server1, Server2, Server3, etc.  Is there another way to do this?  thank you  :-) 

[Emir AmEx (9.1)]

it is interesting that the SAN services globally have the weirdest requirements for # of fields as well as really long forms

We open a popup window, let the user dynamically enter more fields if they need to, at the end write the output to a hidden field

[Ken Komara - Allstate]

We take a similar approach. We would prompt the user for the number of servers. If the user selects 2, we display two dictionaries. If the user selects the option "more than 5" we display a standard dictionary requesting the user to complete a spreadsheet and attach it to the request. The standard dictionary contains instructions on attaching files, because this is NOT intuitive in RC, as well as a link to the spreadsheet.

[James Fuller]

We use a similar method as Ken.

[Tylor Hagerman]

We do something similar to Emir, but within the form itself.  We have the user enter data into a few fields then they press a button which performs a validation then appends the data to a very large text field that is read-only to the user.  Finally their original entries are cleared out so they can repeat the action as many times as they want.  The upside is that the user can add as many items to the list as they want.  The downside is that they cannot edit the list once they add an item to it (They can

[Allen Cecil]

The enhancement request already submitted for this issue is # 21293. I will add all of the companies represented by the postings here to the list for those desiring the enhancement.

[Catherine Wood]

Tylor commented "... to make sure newScale knows we're all struggling with this."

Trust me, we know!

I guess one benefit of having been a customer is that I can now relate more easily to these discussions.  Normally I don't comment but Tylor's reply seemed to be an invitation to do so!

The correct, productised solution to this is non-trivial but one we are committed to providing.  It's just a matter of timing (and please bear with me in that I obviously can't be discussing contents of r

[Meghan Williams]

Just wondering how we can find out if this is progressing? We have the situation we staff get their travel approvals through RC and they select 1 - N sectors. We've limited their number of selections, but its still cumbersome code.

Thanks, Meghan