How to Add a Table of Contents for Long Forms

Introduction

Do you have a long-form that you would like to add a table of contents to? You can easily add HTML links to the top of your form as well as the section headings on your form that allow users to jump quickly and effortlessly in between sections of your form. In this tutorial, we’ll show you the HTML you need in order to complete this!

Setting up your form

In our example, we’re going to create an employee personnel form that will collect various information such as personal, dependents, emergency contacts, and interests.

So to begin, create a new form and add the relevant fields. The various information categories, as mentioned previously, will be divided by using the HTML form field.

If you need any assistance in creating your form, please review this documentation.

Adding the HTML links to the headings

Now that the form is set up, it’s time to add our links to the section headings.

For example, let’s add a link to our Personal Information section.

<h2><a id="personal">Personal Information</a></h2>

With this HTML, we’re adding an HTML heading of h2 to our form, and inside that heading, we’re going to add a link. The id of the link is the most important as this determines what the link’s destination is.

You’ll need to repeat this step for each section you have.

Creating the table of contents

With our final HTML step, we’re going to add an HTML field to the very top of the form that will hold an HTML unordered list with links that point to each section of our form.

When these links are clicked, the page will jump to the appropriate section of the form.

<ul>
<li><h2><a href="#personal">Personal Information</a></h2></li>
<li><h2><a href="#dependents">Dependents</a></h2></li>
<li><h2><a href="#emergency">Emergency Contacts</a></h2></li>
<li><h2><a href="#hobbies">Hobbies & Interests</a></h2></li>
</ul>


Styling the table of contents

This step is completely optional, however, if you’d like to add some styling to these links just copy this CSS to your site.

If you need any help with adding CSS to your site, please review this tutorial.

div#wpforms-1279-field_34 ul {
    text-align: center;
}

div#wpforms-1279-field_14 ul li {
    list-style: none !important;
    display: inline-block;
    margin: 5px 10px !important;
}

div#wpforms-1279-field_14 ul li h2 a {
    font-size: 18px;
}

#wpforms-form-1279 h2 a {
    font-size:26px;
    width: 100%;
    display: block;
	  color: #000000;
}

div#wpforms-1279-field_14 ul li h2 a:hover {
    color: #b95d52;
    text-decoration: underline;
}

In our example, the HTML form field ID is 14 and our form ID is 1279. This means our CSS will only be applied to this specific form and field ID.

If you need help finding where your form and fields IDs are, check out this tutorial.

And that’s all you need to easily create a table of contents at the beginning of your long form! Would you like to also learn how to create an internal use field you can use to filter your entries? Take a look at our tutorial on How to Add a Filterable Field to a Form for Internal Use.