UI of Form with 40 fields

I have a form which has about 40 fi开发者_运维知识库elds.What are the effective patterns to create such type of form so that user has no problem in filling up the data? One pattern i can think of is a multipage form.Please suggest any other alternatives as well.I am dealing with a web form .

Breaking the form up is a must, because it's an overwhelming UI experience for the user to have 40 fields displayed all at once.

I would recommend splitting the form up into 2 or more pages. Another idea would be to create "sections" of the form, and put them in AJAX'd segments, so the user progresses through each step of the process.

Here ( http://css-tricks.com/ajax-load-container-contents/ ), is an example of using jQuery to load HTML from AJAX, you could easily do the same thing except with form elements.

Yes, you probably should break the form in two.

I think using tabs makes sense here. You can break up the fields into relevant blocks and make each block a tab. Here is a tabs implementation using jquery.

http://jqueryui.com/demos/tabs/