Handling user interaction with form

[monkle]

I have a system that is currently live that is having issues with handling user interaction.

To be more specific, towards the end of a series of pages displayed to the user I run a series of backend functions, including cURL sessions and database work.

It is imperitive that the user not interupt this process, as the system has proven very fragile to interuptions in the process (E.G. hitting back, stop, or refresh buttons in the browser). There is a warning on the preceding page that the functionality may take longer, but it has proven ineffective. The idea currently on the table is to dump the user to a "Processing" screen, but I don't know how to do this outside javascript. I don't trust javascript in a production sense for this kind of functionality, as not all browsers support it fully.

Do any of you have suggestions for ways to handle this, or know resources that address this situation? It is exceedingly important to find a solution of some sort to this issue, and the quicker it can be resolved completely, the better. This issue extends beyond my personal experience, however, as it has much more to do with the browser level.

Any input and/or suggestions are greatly appreciated.

 

[monkle]

As a solution, is there a way to detach or start a process so that it will continue running regardless of what happens in the browser? If it is possible to do this in such a way that multiple instances of the detached process can run without interfering with each other then it could be a valid solution.

 

[jpadie]

you absolutely can spawn processes. checkout exec and popen as two examples.

if popen is too complex a tool, at a more trivial level, you could set a script up to run in the background and use the user-interacted php script to set a system cron job to run the background script thirty seconds later (say).