Show information before end of script

Opalenet has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Show information before end of script by merlyn (Sage) on Sep 15, 2005 at 15:31 UTC
See my "Watching long processess through CGI" magazine article. -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.	[reply]
Re^2: Show information before end of script by Opalenet (Acolyte) on Sep 15, 2005 at 16:49 UTC
Thank you monks (mean, folks), I really appreciate the help. I'll try to implement one or another of your solutions and get back to you. Regards, Andrei	[reply]
Re: Show information before end of script by NateTut (Deacon) on Sep 15, 2005 at 13:20 UTC
It sounds like you need to turn print buffering off. Try putting `$\| = 1;` before your first print statement. this will turn Auto Flush on.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Show information before end of script by phaylon (Curate) on Sep 15, 2005 at 13:30 UTC
If this is something more complex, I'd spawn a working process off the request and present a "Processing." Page with automatic reloads and a "check now" link. But that's more a question of habits, as I hate long running requests :) Ordinary morality is for ordinary people. -- Aleister Crowley	[reply]
Re: Show information before end of script by amw1 (Friar) on Sep 15, 2005 at 15:07 UTC
Not strictly a perl solution, but you could use ajax to handle this. Your CGI would return a page that says processing and exit. This page would have some javascript that would periodically do an xmlhttprequest to a status script on the server. When the job is done the javascript would get the finished status from the status script and update the page accordingly. Info on ajax and perl http://www.modernmethod.com/sajax/	[reply]
Re: Show information before end of script by ruoso (Curate) on Sep 15, 2005 at 17:23 UTC
This is a task for Non-Parsed-Headers... See Here. daniel	[reply]
Re^2: Show information before end of script by Opalenet (Acolyte) on Sep 15, 2005 at 20:24 UTC
$\|=1 did it just fine ! Thanks a lot. Andrei	[reply]
Re^3: Show information before end of script by ruoso (Curate) on Sep 15, 2005 at 20:38 UTC
Is it a web application? If it works, I'm really impressed. daniel	[reply]
Re: Show information before end of script by schweini (Friar) on Sep 15, 2005 at 23:46 UTC
what i do in long report-generating scripts is to send a `<script> updateProgressbar( $percentCompleted ) </script>` [download] to the browser from inside the loop that's doing the computation. Obviously, i define `function updateProgressbar(percent)` in some globally included .js file. Works great for me, but just be careful not to send something like this on every iteration of a fast-iterating loop, since you could easily clog even broadband connections with millions of these instructions. i usually do something like `&printProgessJavascript( %percent ) if ($i++ % 1000 == 0);` [download] on the perl side.	[reply] [d/l] [select]