Status updates while servlet is running...

Question

I have a servlet that launches a dozen different thread to process a bunch of network information. Now, these all work fine and I have a please wait page while they run (about 45 sec) but the users are getting ansy during this time and would like some feedback while the process are running.
I thought, no problem, I'll send a message back to the user when each process thread finishes. No such luck, I get one of two results with my attempt at coding this. First, the messages do not show until the main controlling servlet is finished and they are just thrown in at the top of the results page. Or, second, the messages all come up as they are suppose to but then the results page never displays.
What am I doing wrong? Thanks!
Ross

Answer 1

I set up a <DIV> tags on the request page that has the Please wait HTML in it. Then during the submit, I call some JavaScript that hides the first DIV section and displays the second. Bceause the DOM is not standard across browsers, hence why I want to have the servlet do this rather than my current method. I needed to write this JavaScript function so this would work in most browsers:
function PostandWait() {
    if(document.getElementById) {
        document.getElementById('main').style.display='none';
        document.getElementById('main').style.visibility='hidden';
        document.getElementById('banner').style.visibility='hidden';
        document.getElementById('wait').style.display='block';
    else if(document.layers) {
        document.layers["main"].visibility="hidden";
        document.layers["wait"].visibility="show";
    else if(document.all) {
        document.all["main"].style.visibility="hidden";
        document.all["wait"].style.visibility="visible";
    else {
    document.jobform.submit();
}//PostandWait