Request form validation

A validation process after submission of the form checks that all mandatory information has been provided, and that appropriate client contact information, has been provided. It also checks that any email addresses provided are in a valid format for an email address and does a number of checks to ensure that the form is being submitted by a human, not a spider or spambot.

Further, if attachments are being provided by the request, and the attachment is detected as being unsafe by the virus checker, the file will not be uploaded and a validation message will display.

Here’s an example of some validation messages. Red messages must be attended to before the request can be Submitted. Orange messages are just warnings. They suggest action but the actions do not have to be completed to be able to submit the request:

If the validation detects a problem the screen is redisplayed with the fields causing problems clearly indicated with cross marks, their field names highlighted, and helpful error message/s displayed. After corrections have been made, or even if no corrections are needed, if a validation message has displayed, the end user must click Submit to have the validated request sent to your service.

One of the checks to prevent spammers from using RefTracker forms will result in a validation error being presented to anyone who takes more than 20 minutes to fill out a RefTracker request form. If more than 20 minutes has passed from the time the RefTracker form was displayed until the time that the Update button is clicked, the client will see a validation message like the one in the screen print below – note that all the data that the client entered is still showing in the form, and all they need do is click Submit again, to successfully submit their question.

Validation messages can also appear as an error notification after submission of the form, for example, if HTML is provided in any field other than the main Question field (which is protected from bad HTML), an error block will appear advising that the HTML needs to be removed before the question can be accepted.