How To Make A jQuery Async Multi-Response From One PHP Script Run

Question

I have a run.php that has a button on it called "Run". Clicking it does a jQuery $.get() AJAX call back to a response.php on the server, and sends the result to a Javascript callback function getResponse(sData) inside run.php's HTML for display back on the browser. I want to have things such that as response.php runs through a list of tasks, it echoes a response back with the echo command and for getResponse to update a DIV with that status as it moves along. So, let's say I have 5 steps inside response.php, and therefore 5 echo statements back to getResponse().

I tried to get this to work, but what happens is that jQuery waits and then sends one single response all at once, rather than sending as it goes along with the 5 responses.

What's the technique?

The reason I ask is that I have a script that does something to a bunch of files. The first thing it does is a file count, so it updates my progress bar. Then, as it runs through files, it needs to increment my progress bar like every 1000 files.

Answer 1

I think there's no way to make that ajax call to have multiple response in just one call... but what I could suggest is you make a session on php... and in every steps on your tasks function, update that session... then make another ajax call that checks that session if any updates happened... if there is update then do what you have to do....

Answer 2

As you can't really get progress with xmlhttprequest, I suggest you can look into other ways of doing AJAX calls. One of them is through iframe. You can create hidden iframe, set it's sources to request.php and then periodically just check it's content. It should be possible since it's all it the same domain and restrictions does not apply.

iframe might work because it's not that different from normal browser window, meaning that it periodically applies data it gets into DOM even if request hasn't been finished yet. There's potentially might be problems with how different browsers do that, i.e. IE shows new content only if it got more than 4K or something. But it is possible to overcome that, I'm sure.

So, create new hidden iframe, add src attibute to your php script, make that script periodically write something to the client and on the client check what have been written and convert it to shiny GUI stuff.