SPUG: Showing progress in the browser

[Joshua Lanza]

I've never had to do this, but I assume that sites like expedia use some
sort of refresh (meta tags or otherwise). On each refresh, the page checks
the long-running process's status, and returns HTML that says "still
processing" or gives the results of the process, depending on status. This
is probably the most cross-platform approach.

You could also expose a web service that returns process status based on the
browser's session. Depending on which browsers you need to support, you
could use something like XmlHttp in MsXml, which supports async web service
calls from the browser.

Another approach that occurs to me it to put the progress into a frame and
have it refresh, then notify the other frame(s) when the process is
finished. A little JavaScript involved there.

The first approach is probably the best.

Josh

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <dan at concolor.org>
To: <spug-list at pm.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 22, 2004 10:13 AM
Subject: Re: SPUG: Showing progress in the browser


> On Thu, Jan 22, 2004 at 09:33:08AM -0800, Douglas Kirkland wrote:
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA1
> >
> > On Thursday 22 January 2004 09:14, Luis Medrano wrote:
> > > List,
> > >
> > > I have a question I would like to show the progress on the CGI on the
> > browser for example 10%, 20% 40% of complision. or something like
that...Any
> > one knows how I can do this??..
> >
> >
> > I do not know how this can be done.  Most site that show how much is
done do
> > it by cheating.  They will take a good guess on how long it will take
and
> > display that information.
>
> It occurs to me that you might be able to hold the http connection open
> and feed the data through at a very slow rate. Perhaps along the lines
> of a dot every second or so. This might cause problems
> with some browsers timing out on the connection.
>
> Another method I've actually seen is to use the refresh meta tag and
> base it on a guesstamate of how long it should take.
>
> -dan