Re: [help-cgicc] Refresh help

[Alexander J. Oss]

I use the following technique all the time at work:

1.  User submits a form to a CGI application.
2.  CGI application creates an HTML file that essentially says "your process
is starting", and which has a refresh META tag.
3.  CGI application spawns a long-running subprocess which will periodically
overwrite that same HTML file (also with refresh META tags).
4.  CGI application returns a Location: header redirecting the user to the
HTML file, instead of returning HTML itself.

This causes the user to see nothing but the status HTML page which refreshes
itself periodically.  I think the same technique would probably work for
you.  The only difficulty with the technique appears to be when the
subprocess writes the status page at the same time the web server process
tries to read it, but this is rare.

I'm quite proud of and familiar with this, so if you have any questions,
feel free to ask.  (This isn't so much a cgicc issue as it is a general CGI
usage issue, so it's your discretion as to whether the help-cgicc list is
the proper forum for the discussion.  I myself like to see CGI usage
discussions here, though.)

Hope that helps!

----- Original Message -----
From: "Quintin Connell" <address@hidden>
To: <address@hidden>
Sent: Friday, November 01, 2002 6:15 AM
Subject: [help-cgicc] Refresh help


Hi,

I have a cgicc application and the user submits a POST request which does a
write to a database and on successful completion a status page is displayed.
If  a user now clicks on the Refresh button on their browser they get the
following  message - The page cannot be refreshed without resending the
information. Click  Retry. If they do the information is resent and a
duplicate
now appears in the  database. Is there any around this to avoid creating
duplicates? To make the status page appear that it was obtained by a GET
request, for example? So that Refresh requests will only redisplay that
page. Because users do need to refresh the status page.

TIA
Quintin


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