topic Re: Displaying "Please Wait" for long running stored processes (multiple outputs) in Developers

Displaying "Please Wait" for long running stored processes (multiple outputs)

FrankE — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 15:32:48 GMT

Hi guys, I have a stored process that takes several min to complete. I found a paper (http://support.sas.com/kb/26/181.html) that describes how to display a "Please Wait" message while the stored proc runs. That works great! My issue is that the output of my stored proc is an Excel workbook generated with the ExcelXP tagset, not HTML. Using the linked sample results in the modified headers being ignored and my results are sent to HTML, not Excel. Is there any way to display a "Please Wait" message while the stored proc is running, then use the headers to open a "Open/Save As" box for Excel?

Re: Displaying "Please Wait" for long running stored processes (multiple outputs)

Lokraj — Fri, 25 Sep 2015 20:48:39 GMT

Hello Frank,

I have the same issue. Did you find the solution for that?

Lokraj

Re: Displaying "Please Wait" for long running stored processes (multiple outputs)

Quentin — Fri, 18 Dec 2015 00:38:23 GMT

I found this post from @boemskatsvery helpful:

https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Stored-Processes/Stored-process-writing-to-the-browser-and-excelxp-tagset/m-p/152833#M2666

And discussed more in this thread:

https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Stored-Processes/Is-there-documentation-on-REPLAY-stored-process/m-p/164836/highlight/true#M2721

My implementation of this is something like:

1. Have a stored process that produces an the Excel file (or whatever) and writes it to some temp space on the SAS server.

2. That server returns an html page which has the please wait message and and iframe.

3. The iframe invokes a second stored process (StreamResults) via URL which streams the Excel file back to the browser.

So basically, as I understand it, a browser cannot get receive both an html file and an excel file in one request from a web server, because you only have one header to define the content as html or excel. So the workaround is to have the stored proces return an html file, and then that html file can invoke a second stored process (in an iframe) which delivers the excel file.

It takes a bit of work to set up, but it's been working well for me.

Hope that helps.