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How to tell the user "we're working on it"
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| Kevin Scaldeferri 2007-07-30, 7:23 pm |
| The system I'm working on has a number of page requests which can
take a long time to return the results to the user. Not to
surprisingly, the users don't like looking at a blank page for 30-60
seconds before the reply comes back and finally renders. I'm
wondering what techniques other people use for dealing with this sort
of thing, and if there are POE components to help out with it.
One approach would be to return a placeholder page that says "working
on your request <spinner>" that periodically refreshes until the
request is done. I know how to do this using a unique request
identifier in the URL, but I'm not sure how to make this play well
with bookmarking or emailing URLs to other people.
I could also just send some header HTML out right away, then wait
until everything else is ready to send the rest of the page, but this
approach seems counter to how most of the templating systems want to
work. Is there some straightforward way to combine HTML templating
and partial page loading? Of course, this approach still leaves the
user sitting looking at an unchanging page for quite a while.
My ideal UI would be some sort of AJAXy UI with status messages being
replaced with results as they come in, but since I basically know
nothing about how to implement that sort of thing, and I'd need to
substantially re-engineer my application to do it, I'm hoping to find
some sort of acceptable partial solution that will work while I learn
how to do what I really want.
I realize this post is only partially POE related, but I'm hoping I
can get some pointers from people who may have built systems with
similar behavior.
Thanks,
-kevin
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| Tom Lanyon 2007-07-30, 10:18 pm |
| On 31/07/2007, at 8:44 AM, Kevin Scaldeferri wrote:
> The system I'm working on has a number of page requests which can
> take a long time to return the results to the user. Not to
> surprisingly, the users don't like looking at a blank page for
> 30-60 seconds before the reply comes back and finally renders. I'm
> wondering what techniques other people use for dealing with this
> sort of thing, and if there are POE components to help out with it.
>
>
> One approach would be to return a placeholder page that says
> "working on your request <spinner>" that periodically refreshes
> until the request is done. I know how to do this using a unique
> request identifier in the URL, but I'm not sure how to make this
> play well with bookmarking or emailing URLs to other people.
>
> I could also just send some header HTML out right away, then wait
> until everything else is ready to send the rest of the page, but
> this approach seems counter to how most of the templating systems
> want to work. Is there some straightforward way to combine HTML
> templating and partial page loading? Of course, this approach
> still leaves the user sitting looking at an unchanging page for
> quite a while.
>
> My ideal UI would be some sort of AJAXy UI with status messages
> being replaced with results as they come in, but since I basically
> know nothing about how to implement that sort of thing, and I'd
> need to substantially re-engineer my application to do it, I'm
> hoping to find some sort of acceptable partial solution that will
> work while I learn how to do what I really want.
>
Kevin,
You haven't really detailed anything about what you're doing. Are you
using a web-framework? which HTTP server? what are you using POE for?
etc.
From your basic overview I would be assigning a unique ID to a task
(possibly associated with a specific user's session if you desire)
and including that in the query parameters ( http://server/page?
taskid=12345 ) and have your page return a 'refresh' header and some
pretty waiting message until the task is complete. This means your UI
will be constantly pulling information from the backend, saying "is
it ready yet?".
On the other hand, your 'ideal UI' would involve pushing events from
the POE application server to the client UI, instead of having the UI
pull results from the backend. This is the sort of thing being done
on the Cometd project so you may wish to have a look around there
( http://www.cometd.com ). There's lots of collaboration between the
Cometd, POE and Catalyst projects so you shouldn't have a hard time
integrating something like this.
Regards,
Tom
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| Kevin Scaldeferri 2007-08-03, 4:33 am |
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On Jul 30, 2007, at 7:45 PM, Tom Lanyon wrote:
> On 31/07/2007, at 8:44 AM, Kevin Scaldeferri wrote:
>
>
> Kevin,
>
> You haven't really detailed anything about what you're doing. Are
> you using a web-framework? which HTTP server? what are you using
> POE for? etc.
Well, POE is my web server. I guess I figured that much was implicit.
>
> From your basic overview I would be assigning a unique ID to a task
> (possibly associated with a specific user's session if you desire)
> and including that in the query parameters ( http://server/page?
> taskid=12345 ) and have your page return a 'refresh' header and
> some pretty waiting message until the task is complete. This means
> your UI will be constantly pulling information from the backend,
> saying "is it ready yet?".
Yes, that's the first approach I listed, which breaks bookmarking.
>
> On the other hand, your 'ideal UI' would involve pushing events
> from the POE application server to the client UI, instead of having
> the UI pull results from the backend. This is the sort of thing
> being done on the Cometd project so you may wish to have a look
> around there ( http://www.cometd.com ). There's lots of
> collaboration between the Cometd, POE and Catalyst projects so you
> shouldn't have a hard time integrating something like this.
Okay, I'll have a look at that.
-kevin
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