[RESOLVED] howto redirect but without showing execution?

fazbob

hello coders,

i have a CMS (content managemtn) page where some content admin guys update news (text) for an SMS news service, and after updating the content, the content is sent out to mobile users who have subscribed for the SMS News. The content is sent by SMS immediately - the page that sends out the news by sms is called: pushNews.php, and the page that allows content to be updated is called updateContent.php.

So the flow is this:- login.php -> updateContent.php -> pushNews.php.

The process of sending out the new content to the users takes a while because of a few reasons: number of users on db and speed of the sms gateway.

This is how i would like to modify the system - after the content administrator has updated the content (by clicking on the submit button on updateContent.php) he should not see the page that sends out the news, pushNews.php - i can redirect him to another page - maybe one that allows him to log off or update more content: BUT i dont want the page to show that there's something executing at the back.. sending of SMS's.

So is it possible to submit the content from the updateContent.php page and start sending out messages immediately BUT without showing the content administrator that the page is loading (that the SMS messages are being dispatched).?

This is the only i have in mind (but i dont wanna use it)
:-
schedule the messages to be sent out after maybe one minute (possible to use a cron here).

Anyone with a brilliant idea on this?

Shot-A-Lot
.Faz.

AstroTeg

I kinda like the idea of cron because you can then batch your jobs.

But if you don't want to do that, you might look into [man]popen[/man] which tells PHP to fork another process. You'd still have updateContent.php. And when they submit it, they go to a new page which tells them whatever you like and issues the popen command (and with it, the command to dispatch the SMS messages). They can then do whatever they like with this page (close the browser, go to another page, etc) and the process will continue to run (be careful about infinite loops here).

devinemke

i too second the idea of using cron. store all of the pending jobs in a db and run a cron every 5 minutes.

Weedpacket

Or use at - the one-shot cron. Have your program register the at job to run at a certain time in the future, and when that time comes around the system will run that job; without having to look every five minutes or whatever to see if there is anything to do.

fazbob

will i be correct to say that this function popen() can enable "threading" in php? and please help me here on how to use popen (i havent found a good example online).
i would like to use popen() to start another php script passing some parameters (using http GET), is this possible?

about cron.. how do i dynamically create a new cron job or modify existing crons?

RossC0

Could you use a javascript HTTPRequest (AJAX) asyncronously - call the code - and not wait look for any return... ?

devinemke

fazbob wrote:
about cron.. how do i dynamically create a new cron job or modify existing crons?

cronjobs are stored as regular ASCII text files. PHP has many functions for reading/writing to text files.