If you put <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="10"> into the <HEAD>
section of your HTML, it will cause the customer's browser to
automatically re-fetch the same page after a 10 second delay. The
way you might use this would be to write one Mason page that monitors
the progress of the transaction with the merchant, for example by
looking for a file on the disk. When the file is absent, the Mason
page would display some "still waiting..." kind of content, and
include the META REFRESH. When the file shows up, it indicates the
transaction finished and it contains the results of the transaction
-- the Mason page could then just display (or redirect to another
page that would display) the information about whether the
transaction failed or succeeded.
The specific example Oliver suggested below would be for you to
display a page that says "Please wait...", and in that page include
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="2;url=http://yoursite.com/
post_transaction.html"> or something like that. This way, even if
post_transaction.html takes many seconds to complete, the user will
be looking at the contents of the Please wait... page while they
wait. This is also easier than what I suggested above, because you
can still have the main Mason code in post_transaction.html connect
to the remote merchant and complete the transaction; you don't need
to store the results in the filesystem or a database as an
intermediate step.
Now, in the spirit of "teach a man to fish", I would suggest that you
could have typed "meta refresh" into Google. The first result is a
page from About.com that does a pretty good job of explaining what
this is.
More to the point, if you can figure out what other people call the
thing you're trying to do, you can probably learn what you need from
the web by just searching for it. In this particular case, I would
consider what you are looking for to be a "shopping cart design
pattern" (the Sun Java page about Session Facade is interesting), or
"cgi wait for background process".
Some experience is also helpful in knowing what to query and how to
interpret the results; that will only come with time. Mason has a
much smaller user community than CGI (the oldest name for technology
to process forms on the server-side), so replacing Mason with CGI in
your search string may give you more results, though they may be in
languages other than Perl. It doesn't matter that much; in general,
you can learn web programming techniques from one language and apply
them to another language.
I hope this is helpful.
--Mark Torrance
On Feb 7, 2007, at 9:48 AM, Jim Rey wrote:
Oli
That sound easier, but, sorry to be a pain, nearly all my web
writing experience has been from home, in a vaccuum. I started
this website because, although I have been a Software Engineer for
about 30 years, I suddenly found that I was unemployable when I
turned 60. The problem with this is that you are less likely to
come across new techniques except by chance, like now. So, please,
what is a meta refresh?
Jim
On 07/02/07, Oliver Jeeves <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
John Cappiello wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 07, 2007 at 05:00:17PM +0000, Jim Rey wrote:
>> 1. Display a page that requests card details from the holder
(this is
>> easy).
>> 2. Pass (POST) the data to a non-display page on the merchant's
>> website. (How, LWP?)
>> 3. Receive the response code(s). (How, LWP?)
>> 4. Notify the customer of the status of the transaction. (this is
>> easy, but how do I wait for 2 and 3?)
>
> You can initiate a background process and then have part 4 reload
every few
> seconds until the background process has indicated completion and
return the
> status to the client.
>
> Further improved with a bit of ajax to make it appear more fluid
to the user.
>
> John
>
I don't think this method is the best.
You should be able to make a POST request to the merchant, and recieve
the response synchronously. That is, your perl script won't progress
beyond that point until you either have your response, or there has
been
some error like a timeout.
The script that handles the data posted from your form /can/ do this,
but the problem is that the form page will remain on the clients
screen
until everything is finished processing, meaning that if the merchant
site takes a while to respond, bored users might decided clicking
twice,
three times etc. on the submit button would be a good idea. Much
badness.
A better solution, is to post to a script that displays a 'please
wait'
message, and uses a meta refresh to re-direct to a page that actually
POSTs to the merchant site, meaning that while the users wait for your
script to get a reply from the merchant, they are looking at the
'please
wait' page.
The difficulty with this, is passing the credit card details from one
script to another, and will require storing them somewhere
temporarily.
The benefit is that it doesn't require javascript, or the page to
constantly reload.
-Oli
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---
Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services,
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Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache
Geronimo
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Mark Torrance, CEO, Vinq, LLC www.vinq.com [EMAIL PROTECTED]
408 236-7701 (w) 408 420-9239 (cell) 408 516-9479 (fax)
560 S. Winchester Blvd., Suite 500, San Jose, CA 95128
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
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