Interim message when downloading a file

Question

On my website I have an option to display some data and also to download it in csv format. Some of the data is quite large (20,000 - 900,000 rows in SQL). When I display it on the site I use paging so that it quickly displays only x amount of rows at a time, however, the download link of course should and is downloading the entire report which can take several seconds to a couple of minutes depending on file size. I'm wondering if there is a way to create an interim pop-up or message in-line that says something like "Gathering Information..." where I could additionally put an animated gif so the user knows something is happening. Creating this shouldn't be an issue but I'm not sure if there is a way to trigger that to disappear once the download pop-up appears. The solutions I've seen on this site all suggest using a timer, but thats not an option in this case as the times will vary a lot.

I'm using classic ASP so would like to use either that or JavaScipt. I could additionally use flash if makes a difference.

Answer 1

在收到来自服务器的Comet样式消息后，我可能会把“ Gathering info ...”消息隐藏起来，一旦文件准备好下载，就可以将其发送出去。

Answer 2

The gist of it is to use a cookie that you set using pure javascript or jquery cookies for ease of use. Then you send the cookie's name to your server, which sends an update for said cookie with the file once delivered.

Meanwhile you have some JS code that checks periodically for the cookie to see if its updated, and can then update the layout accordingly.

Answer 3

I ended up doing this a different way. On my site I have page we'll call "default.asp" on that page is a link to another asp wel'll call "download.asp". download.asp is where the code is to do the SQL query and create the report, which means this is where the wait comes in. After the report is prepared the popup to save, open, etc is displayed. What I ended up doing is creating a div that by default is hidden. When the download button is clicked the div is unhidden, then just before the popup is displayed I once again hide the div. Hopefully this can be of help to someone else as well.