Eggtimers and other "please wait" images

[Davidc316]

Hi,

I've checked both this forum and Google, but can't find any tutorials on how to do this one. Here goes...

I (like many of you) have a script that allows users to upload a files to a website. When the person has pressed the upload button I would very much like them to have a picture of an animated gif (perhaps an eggtimer or something) appear on the screen with a nice friendly message saying "Your file is uploading, please wait." And of course, once the file has finished uploading, I'd like the image to vanish.

I haven't got a clue how to do this via PHP and would be eternally grateful if anyone could help me out.

Thanks!

[bpat1434]

Well, I think what the most common way to do it is something like this:

1. User inputs info and file into form on page1.php

2. page1.php posts the information to page2.php

3. page2.php displays the small animated gif and message

4. page2.php manipulates the file and all.

5. When all manipulation is done, page2.php redirects to page3.php

6. page3.php displays confirmation or whatever.

Now, if you don't want to redirect to page 3, you can use CSS to hide the <div> with the code: visibility: hidden. You can attach it with Javascript using output buffering and such.

[Davidc316]

Thanks!

That's kinda how I expected it to go, but I was having troubles with the page refusing to redirect because some output had already been sent to the screen before the header redirect.

Anyway... it's all solved now. Thanks again. I owe you one!

PS- I can't figure out how to mark these threads as resolved.

[bpat1434]

Thread Tools --> Mark Thread Resolved

[Davidc316]

On second thoughts, this one isn't quite solved yet. I have (so far) been using javascript to do the page redirect upon page load:

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript"><!--
function redirect() {
window.location.href = "fck_image.php";
}
//-->
</SCRIPT>

...so the theory was that if I put my PHP/MySQL code at absolute bottom of the page, then the page would load up, show the gif and then redirect once all the PHP and MySQL stuff had been executed. HOWEVER, the problem is that page two is not loading at all until all the calculations have been done.

In short, what I suppose I'm asking is, how do you do the jump from stage 4 to stage 5 (as suggested above)?

Many thanks!

[bpat1434]

look into [man]ob_start[/man] and [man]ob_flush[/man] to deal with output buffering and showing information prior to PHP being done its thing.