advanced flash form

[Tiger Lady]

I posted this in the rich form as well i hope that is ok.

Ok I am almost there. I have built a flash form for gift certificate
purchasing here [url]https://www.signatureroom.com/gift2.cfm[/url] it works pretty good
but now down to the nitty gritty details. I hope there are some answers here.

I have viewed the live docs till i am blurry eyed.

First the form seems to take a long time to load - even the preloader. in
the
cfform tag i have it specified to do a preloader but not sure if it is working
right. I realize this is a large form but i thought one of the advantages
would be so the user doen't have to scroll down but is there any way to speed
up the loading or at least have the preloader come in sooner?

<cfform action="giftpurchase.cfm" method="post" name="giftcards" timeout="5"
preloader="true" format="flash" height="600" width="500" skin="haloblue"
id="giftcards" preservedata="true">

Also the preservedata doesn't seem to work.

Now down to some of the validation questions.

I have 4 Gift purchasing areas where users can input information for four
different gift cards. I require the first one to have fields filled in.
however on 2 - 3 I only want to have the users fill in the information if a
value is put into the gift amount field. At that point they should then have
to fill in the rest of the information. Taking this a step further, they have
a choice to ship to the billing address or send to a specified address. if
they choose to send to a specified address I want to require them to fill in
all the shipping fields. and not require if they choose to send to the
billing
address.

On the final box for the total. Is there a way to add up all the gift
certificate amounts to give a total so they don't have to put in manually. I
know how to do this in just regular cf but not sure how to do this in flash
form. seems like everything i tried breaks. It would be even ultimately kewl
to be able to add all the shipping charges as well based on priority or fedex
which are flat rates.

If you want to test that is fine. I am hoping to make this live by Monday
so
any help would be greatly appreciated. THank you.

[baz]

Nice form.

Just to let u know, the preloader loads instantly for me - but I'm on
high-speed internet, maybe thats why.

I've done a bit of research myself about the slow loading issue and I
haven't found a solution - it seems to be the nature of flash forms.
Even if your form contained only 1 field, it would take long to load.
So to fix it, someone has to suggest a way to speed up the
initialization of the flash object - perhaps caching it somehow after
the first compilation?

I don't have much help to offer, just want to get this thread going -
I'm curious to see what people have to say.