Intermittent "Page Loading" Screens

[Steve C. Orr, MCSD]

It sounds like you should consider using multithreading.
By running the long process on a separate thread, you free the browser up to
do other things, such as display the current status of the task.
That way the browser will respond immediately with a new page and can
entertain the user while they wait with an animation or status bar.
You can have the browser refresh the status by putting an HTML line like
this in your code:
<META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" CONTENT="3">
That will cause the browser to refresh every 3 seconds (and you can check
the status of the operation each time and redirect to a "done" page when
appropriate.)
Here's more details:
[url]http://www.fawcette.com/vsm/2002_11/magazine/features/chester/[/url]
[url]http://www.dotnetjunkies.com/tutorials.aspx?tutorialid=547[/url]

Another option is that you could call a web service from your client side
JScript. Use the web service behavior for this. (WebService.htc) This
technique works with IE only.
Here's more details:
[url]http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/author/behaviors/overview.asp[/url]

[url]http://msdn.microsoft.com/downloads/samples/internet/default.asp?url=/downloads/samples/internet/behaviors/library/webservice/default.asp[/url]

--
I hope this helps,
Steve C. Orr, MCSD
[url]http://Steve.Orr.net[/url]


"Max" <mquagliotto@surgesoft.com> wrote in message
news:00c601c356c4$8410d420$a501280a@phx.gbl...

> What is the best way to make "Page Loading" webforms so
> that the user has something to see when the server is
> currently busy processing a page?
>
> Help please :)
>
> Max

[Ram]

If you just want to display a simple message like "Please wait
loading...it may take few minutes..", you can do that using layers.

Create a DIV tag for the complete page size and have an animated image
in it to show that the page is loading. On the page load hide this
layer and on unload of the page bring it to the top(z-index) and show
it. If you use smart navigation, this page will be shown until your
long reaquest gets completed and displayed in the browser.

I did this in one of my projects and my queries may run longer than
six minutes. It is working fine and is in production.

Thanks
Ram