Question

I am trying to generate a pdf on a fly at runtime from a database, The application is working fine, but I am wondering if I can show a progress bar until the pdf is generated with out using ajax.

Here is my Action to generate PDF

public ActionResult GeneratePDF(){
    //This Generates PDF
    return ...
}

Now I want to show a progress bar info until the PDF is generated, some thing like this

public ActionResult GeneratePDF(){
        //show progress
        ...............
        //This Generates PDF
        return View();
    }

public ActionResult ShowProgress(){
   //Show progress

    ......
    //return to GeneratePDF to show pdf when it is ready
    return RedirectToAction("GeneratePDF");
}

I appreciate for any suggestions on how to handle this.

Answer 1

I don’t think you can do this. Even if you could continue like this on the server side, once the browser gets a response from its initial request it won’t know what to do with anything else that comes in later.

The HTTP protocol in fundamentally built on a concept of request-response, request-response – and it’s the browser that’s in the driver’s seat, not the server. AJAX is the way to go for this kind of client-side UI richness.