CGI Question : Can I launch a long process and return a page before it's finished?

[lazyEdwin]

The environment is NT server and I am using C++ to write the CGI program.

[JoshT]

I'm gonna guess you could write all the data to the client, but it'll leave the connection open until both processed return (the launched one to your cgi app, then your app to IIS), causing the browser to keep showing the "loading" animation. Unfortunately I don't have good documentation on how IIS runs CGI.

[lazyEdwin]

I don't understand, can you elaborate more, plz?


In fact, I don't need to display the result data on screen, I just want to show a page that inform the user his/her input has been submitted to the server.

[JoshT]

A CGI app prints data to standard output. Whether that data is an HTML page or something else I'm not distinguishing.

What I saying is that you could finish writing your HTML data to the user -- "</body></html>", and depending on buffering, that would go to the client and they'd see the web page, but since your CGI app is still running, the server's waiting for it to return or timeout, so the server's not going to close the connection to the client, so the client doesn't know that there's not more data coming its way, so its waits until the server closes the connection, or it decides to timeout.

[lazyEdwin]

ok

but when the client timeouts, would it affect the CGI program that still running on the server side? I am asking because it seems that when the client timeouts, my CGI program on the server side dissappeared on the task manager (and I am sure it is not finish running yet).
Is it possible to send any message to the client and pretend that the task is complete?

thanks for replying