They come up whenever you register for a site, send feedback, or buy something
online. Often more complicated forms come in multiple screens. If you are getting
set up for a social networking site, for example, you often go through a profile information
form, followed by an interests form, followed by a contact information form.
One of the frustrating things with traditional HTML-based forms is that, since they
are contained in distinct HTML pages that are loaded individually, it is difficult to go
back and change information without losing what you have already written. Flex
makes it easy to get a form with multiple stages created in such a way that the user
can flip back to change any previous information. Flex can also do some really useful
things with the information, such as validating that it is correct.
217
CREATING FORMS: THE ???WILL FLEX FOR FOOD???
REGISTRATION PAGE
Chapter 11
Flex does this through the use of some fairly complicated components, such as the Accordion component
and the tabNavigator component. For our exercise, we will use the Accordion component to create
a three-step registration form??”the form a user would use to join the fictional ???Will Flex for Food???
freelance designer network.
You can see the final example in Figure 11-1.
Figure 11-1. Finished project
218
CHAPTER 11
Getting started
In this chapter we will create a form from scratch in three steps. We will be looking at the layout and
validation of information in the form, but we won??™t connect the project to a database.
Pages:
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157