Buffers...the solution to end all.

I have a web engine that I wrote...and I do error pages in much the same manner that you want to do your "wait" page. The trick is to gather ALL the content of the page prior to printing it out.

What I would do is put everything into some sort of buffer in this manner:

# assume this is a snippet from a fully functional, declared, stricted
+ script

my $buffer;

$buffer .= "content\n<br>\n";

#or for long sets:
$buffer .= <<END
   Content
   <br>
   More content
   <br>
END
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Then I have a subroutine to print the code. So my main script looks like this (very simplified):

#!/usr/bin/perl -t
use strict;
include subroutines.pl;  # I always put my subs for webapps in one pla
+ce...and not in the main script.

my $header = getheader();
my $footer = getfooter();
my $content = getcontent();  # This is where you'd run a bunch of chec
+ks to see what you actually need

print $header;
print $content;
print $footer;

#eof
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Now obviously...if you need to do a "waiting" screen much like you do...you'll need to use a meta tag to set the refresh. that will need to go into the header. So somehow figure out a way for the getheader() subroutine to check if it needs a refresh, and then refresh it.

Hope that helps.

--Coplan