web page design question

[websphereguru]

Hi,
I am having a tough time coming up with a good design for a webpage.
The following is a brief description of what i am trying to achieve.
The requirement is for an insurance company and the goal is to gather
insurance policy information to give its users a quote.

The user can add/edit/delete policies before submitting it and going to
the next step.

Each Policy can have 1 Amount (required) and 0 to 3 fees associated
with it.

At a given time a user can add a maximum of 8 rows.where each
amount/fee is considered a row. So if user enters all rows (1 Amount
and 3 Fees) for the policies then the user can add a maximum of 2
ploicies. On the other hand if the user wants to enter just the Amount
then he can go to 8 policies. I have developed the webpage for this
requirement using layers but there I had to write a lot of code for
that. I am sure there is a better way to handle such a situation and
that is what i am looking for.

I am unable to include the code with this post due to its size. If
anyone is interested in looking at the code i can email it to them.
Thanks

[McKirahan]

<we***********@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:11**********************@f14g2000cwb.googlegr oups.com...

Hi,
I am having a tough time coming up with a good design for a webpage.
The following is a brief description of what i am trying to achieve.
The requirement is for an insurance company and the goal is to gather
insurance policy information to give its users a quote.

The user can add/edit/delete policies before submitting it and going to
the next step.

Each Policy can have 1 Amount (required) and 0 to 3 fees associated
with it.

At a given time a user can add a maximum of 8 rows.where each
amount/fee is considered a row. So if user enters all rows (1 Amount
and 3 Fees) for the policies then the user can add a maximum of 2
ploicies. On the other hand if the user wants to enter just the Amount
then he can go to 8 policies. I have developed the webpage for this
requirement using layers but there I had to write a lot of code for
that. I am sure there is a better way to handle such a situation and
that is what i am looking for.

I am unable to include the code with this post due to its size. If
anyone is interested in looking at the code i can email it to them.
Thanks

When the amount of input (i.e. number of fields) can vary, I'll start of
with a prompt (or page) that asks the user what they want to do then (via JS
or ASP) generate the page to support their stated need. It sure beats
trying to respond to every variation on the fly.

Also, depending on how you implemented them, layers may not work in all
browsers.

[Ivo]

<we***********@gmail.com> wrote

I am unable to include the code with this post due to its size. If
anyone is interested in looking at the code i can email it to them.

Can we have a look at an URL, preferably of a bare-bones test page where
all non-relevant code is removed? Needless to say of course that posting it
to the group is like to emailing it to everybody at once ;-) That way we can
all learn from it and it reduces the chance of people doing double work. All
this speaks for itself very naturally, yes?

--
Ivo

[websphereguru]

The web page can be viewed at
http://www.bleedinginternally.com/wayne/step1.htm

[RobG]

we***********@gmail.com wrote:

The web page can be viewed at
http://www.bleedinginternally.com/wayne/step1.htm

2 thousand lines of code? Sheesh! Those on 56k connections will
appreciate that you didn't post it!

Unless there is a lot of other stuff happening in your page, the
functionality you describe could be done in perhaps 200 lines max.

The code as provided has many bugs, probably because the page has been
trimmed, so I'll just leave it at a couple of small suggestions:

that you have one policy per page.

The "browser detection" is pretty ordinary, you really should test
for document.getElementById before document.all since modern IE will
use either and it is preferable that it be given document.gEBI.

And I would change the "you have used" and "you can have" fields from
inputs to plain text nodes - making them uneditable inputs is just
confusing and unneccesary.

Your page fails totally in Safari. Given the volume of code, I am
not about to go looking for why but I would start with the browser
detection.

--
Cheers, Rob

[websphereguru]

Thanks for the feedback Rob and that is what i am looking for. I am
sure what I have come up with is not the best and correct way to solve
such a situation but again me being new to javascript this is what i
could come up with. Also, I didnt know if using layers was a good idea.
Any suggestions ?