Question

Right now, we are using twiki to be able to communicate with our clients in a more dynamic way. I've created a form that will be filled out for each client, along with a ClientTemplate which has the form attached and instructions on what needs to be added. My problem right now is that im going to be having very non-techie people filling out these forms. the problem with this is that, well... here is an example of my problem. i have a textarea in my form which asks for contact information. i type in the name first, and hit enter, then type in the address, hit enter... etc, then i save out the page, and in the form, the enters did not provide line breaks and everything is strung together. an easy way to get around this is to insert the

<br>

at the end of each line, but for non-techie people, this wont work because no matter how much i can explain it to them, they just wont understand why they need to insert html tags when trying to fill out a form for the many clients we have. is there a setting or any way to keep the line breaks within the form textareas w/o having to use the html BR tag? (here is an example of what i dont want... and then what i want, when filling out the form...

Charles Globe <br>
3147 Main Street, New York <br>
Phone: 358-555-5555

and what i would like it to look like

Charles Globe
3147 Main Street, New York
Phone: 358-555-5555

when adding data into the form... with no need for the br tag...

but right now, if added without the br tags... it looks like...

Charles Globe 3147 Main Street, New York Phone: 358-555-5555

when the form is rendered in the topic.

Environment

-- TWikiGuest - 19 Jul 2006

Answer

Getting TWiki to handle linefeeds and whitespace exactly as one wishes is often one of the first issues encountered when starting using TWiki as a structured wiki.

This question was last dealt with in SearchValueFromFormCanNotDisplayCorrectly, please visit it and see if you can get some inspiration from the examples there.

If you have further questions regarding this issue, feel free to re-open this topic.

-- SteffenPoulsen - 19 Jul 2006

thanks. ill look into that. im also thinking about reworking my form so there is no need to even worry about line breaks, and everything will have its own field. thanks again for the quick response.

-- TWikiGuest - 19 Jul 2006

In case you are using the CommentPlugin to capture the data: I just raised an enhancement request that would convert newlines to br tags. See Bugs:Item2649

-- PeterThoeny - 19 Jul 2006