C# WebAPI rendering PDF with Splash screen

Question

I have a WebAPI that works wonderful. We generate a PDF on our server based on data from our DB and sometimes, these are quite large and take a while. A while = maybe 30 seconds.

Is there a way of returning a splash screen to the user while the PDF is generated and when the PDF is complete, then re-inject the stream to the HTTPResponseMessage after it has already returned a "Loading..." screen?

Answer 1

http://signalr.net/ could be a nice solution to this. Having a request wait for 30 sec is usually not a good solution