I have a client who I have done some webform stuff for. They are all simple data entry forms, one of them is in ASP.NET and is a 4 part form, and the rest are in traditional ASP and are single page forms. They are your standard fill out, click button, emails to the client.

I mostly do WinForm client app development, so sometimes my web stuff is a bit rusty.

The client is asking me to be able to capture the data even when the customer does not fill out the entire form. They at least want to be able to capture the first couple of fields, which is the customer contact information. Some of the forms are long, and they feel people may give up on entering them, but they could possibly do follow ups in person/on the phone if they have contact info.

So this seems a bit tricky without implementing some sort of AJAX type solution to be recording the data basically as it is being typed, or as focus is lost from a given control. I am trying to implement this quickly, so I don't know if trying to work in some AJAX to the page (especially in the traditional ASP pages) will be something worth tackling.

One thought is to (on the traditional ASP forms) seperate them to 2 pages instead of 1, and collect contact info in the first, and all the mundane details in the second, so as long as they have clicked through to the second page, we will have enough info.

The real issue then comes from, how to transport the data over. What is the best way to determine that a user did not complete a form, versus that they did complete a form? I feel as though it will mean logging the "first page" of data to some persistant storage, so that at some point, I can compare to the data that was filled out to completion, and only send them emails for the partial completes (ie the ones they didn't get via the mechanisms already in place).

Any thoughts on this? I am looking to implement it for Monday, so I am trying to keep the solution somewhat simple.