Question

I have a web service written in PHP to which an iPhone app connects to. When the app calls the service, a series of notification messages are sent to Apple’s APNs server so it can then send Push Notifications to other users of the app.

This process can be time consuming in some cases and my app has to wait a long time before getting a response. The response is totally independent of the result of the notification messages being sent to the APNs server.

Therefore, I would like the web service to send the response back to the app regardless of whether the messages to APNs have been sent.

My current code:

<?
    <...>
    echo $chatID; // This has to be printed immediately
    include('apns.php'); // Just invoke this, dont wait for response! 
?>

How do I do this?

Answer 1

Call flush();; this will ensure any data printed earlier is sent to the client immediately. In case you are using output buffering you need to call ob_flush(); first.