how to do a "please wait" kind of page

[Anon]

i have a php script that takes a couple of seconds (15-20) to complete. what i want to do is to put a "please wait" kind of page in-between the the page with the submission form and the page with the results.

is it possible to do it? any pointers will be greatly appreciated...

javier

[pnoeric]

Javier, you probably want to investigate the flush(); command, which will let you send output to the browser while your PHP script is still executing. (Note: flush(); is fraught with weird browser-specific bugaboos; be sure to read the notes on the php.net manual page for all the various workarounds and tricks people have come up with. It's definitely a your-mileage-may-vary kind of command.)

You could also do some tricks with output buffering that might help with the flush(); -- there's a good article at zend.com about this.

good luck,
Eric

[jamesb63]

Hi

This is actually not as difficult as it sounds.

I'll have to outline it briefly, if you want some code to follow, I can e-mail you some from a site I did for my company.

Basically it uses <DIV> tags and a little bit of JavaScript.

The outline is as follows:

<code>
<DIV ID="waitsection" style="display:">
Please wait, page is loading...
</DIV>
<DIV ID="realsection" style="display:none">
<?php
your php code to generate the page goes here
?>
</DIV>
<script language=JavaScript>
var docall = document.all;
docall.waitsection.style.display="none";
docall.realsection.style.display="";
</script>
</code>

You see, because PHP outputs everything top to bottom, 1 line at a time, the browser will output the "waitsection" DIV bit and then will start to do the code for the rest of the page. Once the page is complete and the end bit with the JavaScript is sent to the browser, it will be executed automatically because the code is not inside a function() container. All it's doing really is swapping some display properties.

Hope this helps, please let me know if it does or doesn't. My e-mail address is [e-mail]

Have fun.

James

[pnoeric]

That is a cool trick, using Javascript and style sheets! I don't know if you'll see a problem with browsers caching the output, if so, try the flush(); thing I mentioned to push it out there. But this JS+CSS stuff is very neat.

[watski]

I prefer to use two pages, one that prints "Please wait" and then redirects to the second page performing the lengthy task.

Johan

[[deleted]]

Indeed a very elegant and simple solution.