Please Wait Screen

Question

I'd like to impose a 'please wait' screen between 2 JSP pages. I have a jsp page that prompts the end-user for reporting parameters, such as begin-date & end-date(and others). The user clicks a submit button which links to another jsp page that actually runs the report. The report page calls a bean that calls some Oracle packages, which in turn formats the results in an HTML table. Depending on the report parameters, it can take several minutes to generate the report (millions of rows possible). I want to have some kind of intermediate page with a please wait message, so the user doesn't get impatient and start clicking around, thinking that nothings happening. I have teenage daughters, I know the impatience routine all too well.
I thought about using a forward declarative, and an include, but based on the doc I've read, it doesn't look like they would work. Any ideas where I could go with this.
Should I have the destination page try to display the please wait screen, or should the caller display the screen and wait for the destination to catch up?
I'm still fairly new to JSP, but not new to programming (20+ years). Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Try using a wait page by putting this code at the top level of your page
if ( session.getValue( "waitPage" ) == null ) {
     session.putValue( "waitPage", Boolean.TRUE );
     // I have the WAIT_PAGE constant defined in an external file...it's just
     // the html string that builds the "loading...please wait" message
     out.println(WAIT_PAGE);
     out.close();
}else {
     session.removeValue( "waitPage" );
     //     End of logic for displaying the wait message
     //     build your page in here