I am working on a form that will contain in excess of 50 fields. Basically, I am trying to set up a credit application for a rent-to-own store, that has many fields of information on a credit application.
I tried the layout in Freeway, and the layout on the page with the alignment set up does not publish the way it looks on the design. The form elements do not come out as wide as I have them designed on the layout, and when I try to set the character field wider or just draw them wider, it overlaps the next field label in the line, and though the field gets closer to the correct size, the next label in the line will not show because it is overlapped in the layout. So, either with extra space on the left and right sides of each field element, or an overlapped label, the form does not look appealing, and not the way I want it to appear.
So, I grab my html book and start designing the form with straight html. This form looks better when published; however, I want to be able to align each element with more of a “grid” look, so that I can set specific positions for each…more like setting up tabs and having each element that I may choose on the various lines of the application ‘lock up’ to a specific tab position.
So, is there any way, either in Freeway or with html that I can set up TABS, so that when I want an item will be at a specific position on this grid-type setup?
I would lay this page out using a table. It’s a perfect semantic match for your content, so don’t worry about the standardistas coming for you in the night.
You should draw a table with the Table tool, set the borders to 0 and the cellspacing or cellpadding to a nice distance so your elements don’t crash into each other. Then look at using my FreezeForm action to Force the form elements to be the same size in the browser as in Freeway’s design view. Finally, set the table to indeterminate height (height can shrink, or uncheck the height attribute) so everything stays neatly stuck together.
Try using the Action, as it will force the fields to be exactly
whatever size you set them in Freeway while designing the page.
Second, you can do all sorts of things within a table, and the table
itself will be invisible, so it could be much larger than your
smallest element and still do the trick you need. Finally, you can
merge cells of one row or column of the table to produce more complex
layouts.
Walter
On Oct 14, 2010, at 9:30 AM, sampolfonz wrote:
I tried putting elements in a table. The length of the elements
would still not come out in browser the same as was set up in Freeway.
Also, the fields are of various lengths on different lines. Does
not a table have to be uniform width and height ?