Please Wait Screen

[John Martin]

I have a web site that basically builds and displays reports. Some of the
reports take a long time to build (up to 10 minutes). I'd like to display a
"Please Wait" screen while the report is being built. Does anyone know how
to do this?

Thanks,
John

 

[John Miner]

Build a small .NET user control that will run inside your browser on the
client workstation. It can use a timer to periodically poll the web server
to find out if the reports are done. Create a web service on the service to
answer the "Is the report ready?" question, and have the user control call
this web service whenever the timer goes off.

HTH

 

[Craig Deelsnyder]

I have a web site that basically builds and displays reports. Some of the
reports take a long time to build (up to 10 minutes). I'd like to display a
"Please Wait" screen while the report is being built. Does anyone know how
to do this?

Thanks,
John

The basic premise most solutions use is to use a Session variable that
will hold a flag to tell you when the report-building process is done.
In your case, it could be the report itself, or just a boolean, that's
an arch. decision to be made based on how much traffic your site has, etc.

Then, what you do is spawn off a separate thread to do the processing,
meanwhile redirect your user to your 'wait page', setting a META tag to
tell it to auto-refresh every so many seconds:

<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="10">

So every 10 sec it'll refresh itself, during which you check to see if
the Session variable is filled (meaning the report is ready). If so,
you redirect to your 'display report' page.

 

[John Martin]

Thanks to both John and Craig, I'll try your suggestions.

Thanks,
John

 

[Steve C. Orr [MVP, MCSD]]

The simplest example I've seen for such a situation is this:
http://www.aspnetpro.com/NewsletterArticle/2003/08/asp200308bm_l/asp200308bm_l.asp

 

[John Martin]

Steve,

Excellent article, right on the money. I'll have to change my web pages a
little to make this work, but I'm confident that it will.

Thanks,
John