I have a form which is too long to be useful displayed on one page.  I 
have it broken up into 7 sections.  All 7 are generated by the same PHP 
source file, from data in a database.

When the user updates a section they can submit it and go to the next 
section, or submit it and finish (return to a higher-level page).  
There is also a navigation form at the top that lets them jump from any 
section to any other, and uses JavaScript to prompt if they try to jump 
without having saved changes they made to the page.  All of this is 
working fine.

What's bothering me here is that when the user is done editing the data 
I use their input to regenerate a style sheet (the form allows them to 
customize the appearance of a web page for their customers).  That's 
expensive -- relatively speaking -- in server load so I'd rather do it 
only once, when they're really done.  But right now I do it every time 
they submit any page -- i.e. whenever any of the seven pages is 
submitted, the generation code runs.  I don't see any simple way to let 
them jump around between pages, yet for me to know when they are truly 
finished with all the data.  Of course I can give the required 
instructions -- "after you are done you have to click submit to save 
all the data" but I bet that those won't be read and the users will 
jump around, fail to save, and then complain that their changes are 
getting lost.

Any thoughts on the design issues here?

Thanks,

--
Tom

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