session of incomplete multi page order?

In a 2-page order form, not all applicants will complete it due to
field validations. If I want to see data from incomplete orders, can
this be done using some sort of session control so that each form page
data saved (each press on submit will save data to disk) will have a
session number attached to it?

Thus if the order log contains several line entries from submit
attempts, then I can locate the lines that belongs to the same order
based on this session ID?

Or is there another or more clever way?

Jan wrote:
> In a 2-page order form, not all applicants will complete it due to
> field validations. If I want to see data from incomplete orders, can
> this be done using some sort of session control so that each form page
> data saved (each press on submit will save data to disk) will have a
> session number attached to it?
>
> Thus if the order log contains several line entries from submit
> attempts, then I can locate the lines that belongs to the same order
> based on this session ID?

This should work fine. Sessions are great to keep data from one page to
another. However, if you want to personally view the sessions, I would
store them in a database instead, as the session data can be quite cryptic.

Can you explain your intent again?


> Or is there another or more clever way?
>

The intent is to see which order forms that were incomplete and the
values that was provided by the user for the incomplete submits. This
way we may contact the person if e.g. one of the contact fields were
filled out or improve the usability of the form.

We prefer not using a database on the server as that may ad more risk
of down time, thus storing data to a text file is likely a bit less
risky, thus I suppose the text file will have to contain some sort of
sessionID number on each text line in the file for us to indentify
which lines belong to the same order. (Down time risk: mySQL server may
be down, while PHP is still working).

Uptime is crucial for us due to volumes, if PHP is less stable than
Perl, maybe we should consider Perl for the forms, but Perl might not
support sessions?

Carl Vondrick wrote:
> Jan wrote:
> > In a 2-page order form, not all applicants will complete it due to
> > field validations. If I want to see data from incomplete orders, can
> > this be done using some sort of session control so that each form page
> > data saved (each press on submit will save data to disk) will have a
> > session number attached to it?
> >
> > Thus if the order log contains several line entries from submit
> > attempts, then I can locate the lines that belongs to the same order
> > based on this session ID?
>
> This should work fine. Sessions are great to keep data from one page to
> another. However, if you want to personally view the sessions, I would
> store them in a database instead, as the session data can be quite cryptic.
>
> Can you explain your intent again?
>
>
> > Or is there another or more clever way?
> >