Question

This is my first post here but I have gotten some great info from this site already. So I thought someone may be able to help.

In my view I have a form that once submitted, the controller passes the job off to navvy and it really works well. The problem is I would like to have another partial on the same page as the form update with the new info once navvy is done working. So in my controller I have:

Navvy::Job.enqueue( GetZip, :get_zip,  @series, :job_options => {:priority => 8})

And then in my navvy block which is located in config/initializers/navvy.rb I have:

class GetZip
def self.get_zip(params)
  fetch = Fetch.new
  fetch.get_zip(params)
# What to put here to update partial #
end
end

Which works as expected. I am just not sure how I can have the partial in my view updated once the navvy job is completed. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

The problem here is that once you’ve fired up a background process you’re no longer tied into that user’s request (which is obviously the point of the background process).

So your background job is not aware of what the user is doing in the meantime. For example they could navigate to another page, or even leave your website.

You could get your background job to create a record in a database that indicates it has started processing and update this status when it has finished processing. That way when the user next refreshes the page you can check the status of that record and the partial can be updated accordingly.

If you want the page to auto-update you could keep polling the status of that record with ajax requests. On the initial submission of the form you could start the polling rather than have it running all the time.