Form behavior in ASP.net

[Scott]

I am using code behind in visual studio to build all of my
new web forms. I am attempting to build a page that will
allow a user to enter a computer name in a text field,
then click a submit button. When the form is submitted, I
am performing a series of checks on the computer that can
take up to 20 seconds. I would like to display to the
user an intermediate page that will show an animated gif
and tell them to wait.

I have three web forms all built in vs.net using code-
behind:
Page1 - Page that allows user to enter pcname
Page2 - Page that displays animated gif
Page3 - Page that gives user results.

In my code behind in page1, on the submit button click
event, I have a response.redirect to page2. Page2 has two
lables and a .gif file on it. In page2's codebehind on
the form_load event I have a response.redirect to page3 to
display the results to the user.

The expected behavior is that once you fill out the text
box and click submit, you would be redirected to the page
with the animated gif, then once again redirected to the
results page. What happens is this:

When a user enters the pcname and clicks submit, the
browser clocks for a 10-20 seconds(processing page3) then
displays page3. I never see page2.

How can I get this intermediate page to display to the
user while they are waiting for all of the processes on
page3 to finish in vs.net?

thanks

 

[Matt Hawley]

Check out this article on Multi-Threading and ASP.NET.
It describes how you can accomplish this "progress bar"
style.

http://www.fawcette.com/vsm/2002_11/magazine/features/ches
ter/

 

[bruce barker]

if you do response.Redirect, then a redirect command is sent to the browser
instead of the page contents,

page 1 submits
the reponse of the submit is a redirect to page 2
the browsers requests page 2, but the response is a redirect page 3
the browser request page 3 (which takes a while)
the browser loads page 3

if you want page 2 to display, it can not use a redirect, but must use
javascript or a meta tag to do the submit. to display an image you must wait
until the image has been display as a submit will stop loading. also
animated gifs will not run during a post.

the most common solution is to have page 2 poll (thru the refresh meta tag)
for the long operation to complete, and only redirect once its done.