What is a good pattern for displaying a form with a One-to-many-to-many relationship in a web form for data entry?
- One parent element (a case - 15 data fields)
- One or more 2nd level elements (customers - 20 data fields)
- One or more 3rd level elements (inquiries - 20 data fields)
Use case: A customer calls in and the user enters a case. There may be more than one contact/customer (someone calling on behalf of someone else) and each of those customers can have one or more inquiry. All of these are contained in the single case. The information will not come in any particular order because the caller will simply start talking and the data-entry person will have to quickly be able to record things in the correct form-field and there can be much going back and forth between the sections.
The customer will never see the case directly and the users of the system who are capturing the information will be trained and use the form multiple times daily so speed of entry is more important than prettiness or even intuitiveness. It's not that I want to avoid intuitiveness, but an "intuitive" design that will split the form up into several forms and/or require several additional steps to enter the data will not be ideal.
Any ideas?
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