inserted alert

[fluff]

Hello
I have been working on a couple of pages that access the same database "A". On one page, the users type in their information and when they submit, it goes into the db "A". The other page is just a page that the staff looks at that displays certain user information in a certain order (data comes from "A"). The staff page refreshes every two minutes automatically or sooner if a staff member presses the refresh button.
A staff member asked me if the staff page can refresh every time a user puts in their information. I'm not sure if I want to change the page, but if I did, how would I go about doing something like that? The user page and staff pages are not really connected to each other. They are both connected to the same db. Should I try to send something from the user page to the staff page that tells it to refresh when submit is press on the user page? Or should I just connect to the db more often and get the records and compare the db recordset with the web page recordset and display if different? Or maybe not compare at all and just refresh the information every minute or something.
Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks

[markrawlingson]

Hmmm... well, with the introduction of AJAX this could be done. You'd have to be intimately familiar with ajax/javascript though.

You could setup a 1 line xml file or text file that simply holds a true/false value, initialized with false. Then, whenever a new submission comes in, you could write true to the file. Now you know that someone has submitted information.

On the page that displays the information from database A to your co-workers, you could have an ajax function check the file for a TRUE value in the background every x seconds (without refreshing the page). If it reads it and the file contains TRUE instead of FALSE you could call a refresh on the page and then set the file back to FALSE, ready for the next submission.

If you want to get even more complicated you could even write an ajax function to redisplay the information on the page even without refreshing.

[fluff]

whoa...ajax is amazing!
I will look into it. Thank you very much!

[markrawlingson]

It certainly is. The best thing to hit the web in about 7 years in my opinion!