Comments on: Ruby on Rails – avoiding browser timeout during long tasks

By: manohar

manohar — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 16:49:51 +0000

i have a problem with ruby ruporting tool i was unable to generate reports in pdf
it has been saying that # slice is missing hw could i resolve this

By: jonesieboy

jonesieboy — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 21:41:09 +0000

Hi Andrew. Generating a PDF is a nice idea.

FreeMIS has been running smoothly at my school this year (once we sorted out decent hosting!). From a personal perspective, FreeMIS already does what I need it to do. The bigger picture of producing a comprehensive alternative to the commercial MIS’s can’t realistically happen unless I get some help on the development side, and that has not been forthcoming. My fault partly, as I have not made much effort to court developers. Maybe I’ll get things together over the Summer holidays

By: Andrew Rose

Andrew Rose — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 21:00:00 +0000

You could send the report request to a server side script that generates a PDF based report which also updates a database with it’s progress. The browser could then display the progress and redirect to the file once complete.

The user could even carry on with there business around FreeMIS and be emailed the report when done.

How is FreeMIS coming along these days? I’ve not seen an update on the main development site for a year now!

By: jonesieboy

jonesieboy — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 16:50:08 +0000

Hi Geoff. I tried BackgroundDRb a couple of times, but always ran into the problem that you can’t generate lots of model variables then pass them back to the live Rails app. In order to make it work, I would have had to do one of the things you suggest. Actually… as I am typing this, the possibility of doing a cached version of each report in the database seems feasible…. Oh dear, looks like I might have to reinstall BackgroundDRb again!

By: Geoff

Geoff — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 10:35:34 +0000

Browsing around for Timeout stuff with Rails I stumbled across this.

I have been developing a project with some fairly long running processes and found BackgrounDRb to be the best solution. I’m having to do SNMP scanning which can take a while

I obviously don’t know your system or requirements as well as you but BackgrounDRb might well be something to look at. But that would probably require storing the reports either on the filesystem or database then when complete sending the browser to a URL which dumps the reports from either FS or DB. Or you could store the reports in an array in the BackgrounDRb worker and then just request the array or part of it somehow.

Not sure how likely it will be that I’ll pop back, but feel free to email me if you want.

Have to say, using Ajax is a pretty nifty solution to this type of problem.