Saving data despite missing required fields in Participants Database

What you are presenting is a classic UI problem for long forms. As you probably know, problems like this don’t have easy answers and they tend to rely on some pretty crafty programming to do their job.

My personal recommendation is to go with Javascript client-side validation using the jQuery validate plugin. It’s incredibly simple to set up, but of course you’ll still need to have some experience with Javascript to make it work. The advantage, though, is that you can actually use it to guide people through the form fill-out process field-by-field because each field they fill out is instantly validated.

If you’re serious about saving the data as it’s entered, it can be done using AJAX, but that’s an advanced application requiring sharp skills.

The general wisdom on long forms is to break them up into pages, so each page of data is actually saved, and the form is reduced to logical parts, as you suggest. But this plugin is not set up to support multiple-page forms: it can support them, but you’ll have to roll your own with that–and it’s not particularly simple.

I guess the short story is if you’re not a coder, you’ll probably have to enlist some help.

Thank you for your prompt response. It is now clear that there is no easy way out and that’s what I wanted to know. And though I got an M.Sc. in Computer Sciences few decades ago and having mastered assembly level languages, even machine code, I am not familiar with contemporary software languages. But based on this background the task to learn to use Javascript or AJAX is not unthinkable. So I will look into it. And don’t worry, your plug-in is excellent even without this feature and as it is so easy to use, it makes people lazy, me included, not willing to use any more sophisticated tools!