Totally Zenned
- Join Date:
- Jun 2005
- Location:
- Kelowna, BC Canada
- Posts:
- 1,033
- Plugin Contributions:
- 4
Dealing with slow shipper server response times
I just want to be able to let the customer know what's going on.
How it seems to work now is the shopping cart waits for the entire page to load, including all external data, before displaying ANYTHING. I'd like to modify that. I want the page to load without waiting for the external data, and just show something like "retrieving shipping rates... please wait" until that data finally arrives, then display it to the user. The "continue" button won't be available until the data is complete, so there has to be some way of knowing when the data has arrived.
I don't even know where to begin. My first problem is how do I get the core code to "ignore" the fact the data isn't all there yet and just display the page without that piece. My next problem is how do I continue to retrieve that data anyway (sort of like multi-threading). My final problem is how do I then replace the "please wait" with the actual data without reloading the page (DHTML?).
Any ideas?
Getting this done would be very valuable to everyone that uses the CanadaPost or UPS or similar modules because right now the customer just sees nothing but a stalled request until the external server responds, which can be upwards of 30 seconds - far too long to expect a customer to wait around that has no indication of what (if anything) is happening.
- Steven
