Question

I want to register if user has been on the page for a while (waiting for some content to load) or has just came to a page..
What would be the best way to do that? I am using Rails and jquery.

Thanks

Answer 1

All users will “come” to the page but if you want to be alerted after they’re there for a specific amount of time you could set a timer to send an ajax request after a number of seconds.

For example, the following code would execute the function inform after every 5 seconds. Informing you that the user is still waiting…

setTimeout("inform()",5000);

The function inform would be an AJAX request which informs the backend that the user is waiting. If you only want the request to fire once or after a number of runs stop firing then you could remove it with clearTimeout().

If you want the timeout to only run while the user is waiting on a specific piece of content to load. You could have the clearTimeout() execute when the content you expect will be delayed returns.

You can find some more info on timeouts here.