All in the <head> – Ponderings and code by Drew McLellan –

They call it progress

I implemented a progress bar on the backend of egroats today. It’s for a number of reports that are taking quite a long time to run (like 4 or 5 seconds). It’s an animated GIF. I wonder how long before I get found out :)

– 31 March 2003 –

3 Responses

01 Apr 2003

Nathan Pitman

Hey drew, I did the same on a project which Pete and I worked on for Jetweb.se at Equant. It was a airline booking system written in JSP which took ages to fetch results, so we implemented a animated gif progress bar. The animation slowed down as it got nearer and nearer to 100% which seemed to work a treat, if the results popped up before it looped then the user was chuffed. :)

02 Apr 2003

Drew

Sounds great. Mine appears in the markup above the point the big query is performed, and then there’s an onload event in the body tag that switches its visibility. The result is the progress bar shows (and keeps looping) until the page is loaded.

Maybe it’s not such a hack – after all it’s letting the user know that the page is being processed and is expected to take a few seconds.

03 Apr 2003

mike

Microsoft have been doing it for years. You know the situation when you’re running an install… ’12 minutes left’ then 15 seconds later ’2 mins’… etc. You’d have thought by know they would have got progress bars sussed.