Provide feedback to user on repert generation

[JonathanS1]

Hi, not sure if you can help with this question but anything would be better than nothing!

Using TXTextControl v12 .NET Server and ASP.NET2, I am doing a lot of processing to create merged word/pdf documents which are then displayed in a web page. The problem is that this process can take some time, with the result that the user thinks nothing is happening as the calling aspx page displays nothing and then closes the page before the report generator has completed (and reporting failure when this is not the case).

I have tried to update a label on the calling page every 10th database record which is processed by ServerTextControl but although the code updates the label, nothing visible actually happens on the calling page.

I then tried a different route and ran the ServerTextControl report generation code in a separate thread and used a callback delegate to update the label on the calling page. Again nothing visible happens on the calling page although the code runs.

Is there anyway I can provide some sort of feedback to the user to indicate the progress of the ServerTextControl report generation code?

Regards,
Joanthan

[Björn Meyer]

Jonathan

This is a general problem of web applications that are not as responsive as Windows applications. Unfortunately, normal HTTP form-based communication does not provide a responsive interface.

Anyway, you could start the document creation process using an AJAX request. A second Javascript is calling a status from a server-side service to update a counter or a progress bar (also AJAX enabled).

This is just an idea and I am also very interested in that. I will try to prepare a sample for that, but this could take some time.

[JonathanS1]

Thanks for this Björn. I had been messing around with Atlas to see if I could achieve some form of feedback to the user but could not get this to work.

However, last year we invested in a set of web controls from Telerik and looking more closely at their Upload control, this provides the functionality I need. The control can be configured to display the progress of any measurable process, and I have used this to show the current report generation stage.

All this without having to do any of the hard work myself - now that's what I like!!

Regards,
Jonathan