Progress indicator on form submission?

but http is stateless!

[dingman]

I've got a form which may take several minutes to process when submitted. (Uploads & parses text files which are likely to be in excess of 50mb) This isn't fundamentally a problem, since there will only ever be one or two people who use it and they don't need to see results right away. However, the processing can litterally take 5-10 minutes, and I'd like to provide *some* indication to the user that things are proceeding propperly. I'm not coming up with a good way to go about it, though. Anyone have a pat solution?

Incidentally, anyone know the characteristics of a MySQL insert as far as execution time? I *think* the processing of my file is O(n), but only if an insert into a table can be approximated as a constant cost.

[lorax]

You could use a Flash GUI to create a progress bar/indicator. You'd need to use action script to read the success/fail state of the upload. I haven't tried this so I wouldn't be surprized if it won't work but it's a thought.

[dingman]

action script? Is that an IE thing?

[jatar_k]

action script is a flash thing

www.macromedia.com/support/flash/action_scripts.html

[lorax]

It's script code used inside of Flash. I know that it is used for some pretty complex interactivity with databases, script languages, and server vars so I also wouldn't be surprized to learn that you could do what you want relatively easily either! :)

[dingman]

Hmm... given that it's an internal admin page, learning a new language and buying flash development tools probably isn't worth it. Nice to know it exists, though.

[Schoolbag]

I use a javascript button that changes from "SUBMIT" to "PLEASE WAIT WHILE WE PROCESS YOUR DOCUMENT. THIS MAY TAKE UP TO 2 MINUTES" (or something like that) once it is clicked.

Fred