Displaying AJAX refreshed report regions

Question

Hi,
Following on from my GetAsync help yesterday I have another question. The next part of the puzzle is I have a tree on the left hand side of the page which, when a node is clicked, causes two reports on the right hand side of the page to refresh. If I use the method described in John's Pro Apex book that works fine.
However what I would ideally like to be able to do is use the GetAsync method again to allow the browser to remain responsive when a node in the tree is clicked. So far I can either insert the whole page into the div - it works, but isn't exactly elegant, or get an XML document from an application process - but this only displays something like "object: [XML document]" (not exact, I don't have it to hand).
I have a feeling I've been looking at this too long, I've looked at trying to insert XML with XSL for formatting but haven't yet got that working (again a complete newbie to XML/XSL pretty much which is probably why...), other options I can think of are traverse the XML document and, with javascript, create a table in the DIV (doesn't feel right), or somehow an adaptation of John's method whereby I somehow traverse the DOM grabbing the content between the BOX_BODY tags.
Any suggestions/ideas gratefully received!
Many thanks,
Gareth.

Answer 1

Ben,
Haven't tried implementing this either but how about:
- you have 5 regions on a page, 1 for each report
- these regions each contain nothing but a div in each case
- each div initially contains nothing but a "Loading..." animation/images/whatever
- You have 5 other pages, each of which are based on a blank page template
- each page contains one report region
- when your original page loads, you kick off 5 asynchronous ajax requests to these other 5 pages
- when the the asynch request completes (i.e. when each page has loaded) you replace the contents of the relevant div (the "loading..." animation) with the contents of the other apex page you have just retrieved with ajax.
I think that should work.
Or, for more flexibility, you could make Application Processes which generate the HTML for each of your required reports. You could then call these via the Ajax requests instead of calling the 5 new Apex pages. (This would mean that the reports are far less easily changeable, however.)
Andy