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I am designing a dynamic form with multivalued field (with the famous "Add another value" button).

My question concerns the validation of this type of fields :

Should blank values be blocking (the user has to remove empty input fields before submitting the form) or should the form take care of removing those empty fields at submit ?

Update : mockup added as requested

enter image description here

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  • Have you got a mockup of your current form - or at least of these type of fields?
    – JonW ♦
    Commented Dec 17, 2013 at 12:32
  • doesn't that depend on the type of the field? if the content can be edited later, leaving it empty might be fine. "hours worked" will be empty in the beginning, but a user might want to enter a value without adding the whole field.
    – Lovis
    Commented Dec 17, 2013 at 12:46
  • As it is a dynamically generated form, there is no way to specialize according the semantic of the fields.
    – NicoINCH
    Commented Dec 17, 2013 at 12:53
  • I see. I thought it would be more like defining a template for later re-use.
    – Lovis
    Commented Dec 17, 2013 at 13:23
  • What is the user describing?
    – DarrylGodden
    Commented Dec 17, 2013 at 14:54

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I had this implemented in one of my recent projects where we had to use a multivalue form to add user names to the list. If an user tried to add a new field and there was an empty field already available, we showed an error message which asked users to populate the previously added new field before adding a new one and also disabled the add button.

mockup

download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups

However if the user did delete the empty field then the button was re-enabled.

We found this to be really useful as we often found users had added a new field to add a specific value and got distracted and forgotten to add it and the alert allowed them to check the data again

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  • This is the solution I wanted to implement in the first place, but I was not sure than blocking the user was the right solution...
    – NicoINCH
    Commented Dec 17, 2013 at 17:39

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