How to stop someone from submitting a form multiple times?

[#1]

My customers order my service by down loading a .pdf form. They then fill out the form and submit the form by my email as a pdf form. How do I stop a customer from submitting the form multiple times. I would like for the customer to submit the form only once filled out. If I need more info I could follow up to their order manually via email. Thanks for your help!



Sorry if a newbie question,



Looking for a way to disable the form after the form is filled out then submitted through their email

[#2]

You really can't, any more than you could stop them posting you

mulitple copies of a paper form.



What is the specific problem you are trying to solve? Maybe we can

suggest a different approach.



Aandi Inston

[#3]

What I understand is you could add javascript code to control or stop multiple submissions? Would this be the best approach?

[#4]

>What I understand is you could add javascript code to control or stop multiple submissions?



I don't see how this could help. If someone opens a fresh copy of the

form, all the JavaScript will be as it originally was.



I repeat:

What is the specific problem you are trying to solve? Maybe we can

suggest a different approach.



Aandi Inston

[#5]

If the problem is that a user is pressing the Submit button more than once, one thing you could try would be disabling the Submit button once it's been pressed. But as Aandi pointed out, if a user re-opens the form, then the button would again be enabled.

[#6]

Would there be a script to disable form once it is submitted? Understand if customer reopened form, the original disabled form would be reset. Any ideas?

[#7]

Are you displaying a "Request submitted" message? Perhaps they are submitting multiple times because they are not aware that the submit was successful.

[#8]

I would like to add this programming to the form. Anywhere you can point me on how to program a request submitted in the form.

[#9]

One of the main reasons why you have a customer posting multiple submits would be because for some reason he/she doesn't know the first one was successful.



Add a property your form to record whether or not a valid submit has already happened. Use script to set that property on submit. Check each time the submit operation is fired to see if the property is set. If it is display an error dialog and stop the submit from occurring.



If someone wants to open multiple copies of your form and fill it out and send it to you, well there's nothing you can do about that.

[#10]

Our approach has been to disable the submit button (not actually disbling it, just stopping from submitting) for ~5 minutes. Why? Because if the user haven't got a response in this time that the submission was successful, it is likely possible that the submission has been interrupted and it's pretty bad if they believe it has been delivered although it hasn't. The best would be if the reader could handle this by itself but it can't AFAIK.