[FX.php List] Interesting form problem and solution

[Bob Patin]

I just finished taking a 100-question survey that was written in IWP,  
and rewrote it in PHP. The survey has lots of pulldowns, as well as  
quite a few sets of checkboxes.

The survey is in 4 separate pages; each of my form pages displays  
previously-entered data (participants can go back and edit their  
answers), and then POSTs to edit the survey data.

On Safari, everything worked perfectly; all the questions were being  
written to the database without any trouble. However, in Firefox on  
the Mac, and on Firefox and IE on the PC, some answers weren't being  
written to the database, or at least, weren't displaying in the  
database.

After scratching my head for an hour, I finally looked at the page  
source of the forms, and discovered that a lot of the checkbox names  
(which are pulled from 40 or 50 value lists that client had put into  
his database) had tabs at the end of each line.

When I went into the database and backspaced out all of his tabs,  
everything started working.

So I thought I might mention this here on the list, in case someone  
else should have a problem like this and not be able to find the  
cause. This was driving us crazy, and I couldn't see anything in my  
code that would cause intermittent failure...

Hope this helps someone at some point,

Bob Patin
Longterm Solutions
bob at longtermsolutions.com
615-333-6858
http://www.longtermsolutions.com
Member of FileMaker Business Alliance and FileMaker TechNet

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