Showing status of current request by AJAX

Question

Hi everyone, I'm trying to develop an application which modifies a couple of tasks of the famous Online-TODO List RememberTheMilk (rememberthemilk.com) using the REST API.

Unfortunately the modifying takes a lot of time, so I want to give a feedback to the users. My idea was just to display a couple of text lines (e.g. modifying task 1 of n...). Therefore I used the periodically_call_remote on my page and called a which reads a Singleton.

In the request I store the text that should be displayed in the same singleton. But I found out, that once I set up a request, the periodically_call_remote does not update the specified div.

My question to this: 1. is this a good way to implement this behaviour? 2. if it is, how do get the periodically_call_remote to work during a submit?

Answer 1

Using a Singleton is most definitely a bad idea. In an advanced production setup it isn't guaranteed that subsequent requests will go to the same process or to the same machine (and subsequently will have a different Singleton). Plus, if you have many users, I don't even want to think about what'll happen to those poor Singletons.

Does any of this stuff actually need to go through your Rails app? It seems like you can call the RTM API via Javascript from the page the user is on and then update the page when the XHR request is complete.