Page Processing animation - how do i do it?

[stuartbrown20]

Hey all,

I have a sendmail function which works great. It goes from details.php (where they enter their info etc) and onto sendmail.php (which compiles the info and sends the email.

After sendmail.php has finished doing it's work i made it echo some HTML basically something like "thankyou, your email has been sent etc". This all works great! 😃

The problem is that while sendmail.php is sending the email it can take around 20seconds, during which time the web browser is basically just blank...

I want to have some kind of simple flash animation just up there saying something like "processing" so the user doesn't get worried and try to send again or leave the page altogether...

How can i make it display some other html while the sendmail script is in process?

Cheers,

Stuart. :rolleyes:

[etully]

Here's one way. There are probably others.

Create a table in a database called sendmail_status which has a id auto_increment int field and a status char(1) field.

details.php posts to sendmail.php. When sendmail.php runs, do the following:
1. add new record to table, set status="P" for processing and get the id field
2. print a meta refresh tag or a location header that redirects to another page called timewaster.php?id=$id leaving the sendmail.php to continue processing.
3. In sendmail.php, after the mail is sent, update the table, set status="D" for done.
4. In timewaster.php, check the status of $id. If it's "D", then print a redirect (method of your choice) to done_sending_mail.php that says, "Thank You. Your Mail is Sent". If the status is "P", then display a meta refresh to timewaster.php?id=$id with a 3 second timer and then display an animated gif.

Bonus points if the animated gif includes dancing penguins.