I’m still relatively new to Flask, and a bit of a web noob in general, but I’ve had some good results so far. Right now I’ve got a form in which users enter a query, which is given to a function that can take anywhere between 5 and 30 seconds to return a result (looking up data with the Freebase API).
The problem is that I can’t let the user know that their query is loading during this time, as the results page only loads once the function finishes its work. Is there a way I can display a loading message while that's going on? I found some Javascript that could display a loading message while page elements are still loading, but my waiting period happens before ‘render_template’.
I knocked together some example code, just to demonstrate my situation:
Python:
from flask import Flask
from flask import request
from flask import render_template
import time
app = Flask(__name__)
def long_load(typeback):
time.sleep(5) #just simulating the waiting period
return "You typed: %s" % typeback
@app.route('/')
def home():
return render_template("index.html")
@app.route('/', methods=['POST'])
def form(display=None):
query = request.form['anything']
outcome = long_load(query)
return render_template("done.html", display=outcome)
if __name__ == '__main__':
#app.debug = True
app.run()
Excerpt from index.html:
<body>
<h3>Type anything:</h3>
<p>
<form action="." method="POST">
<input type="text" name="anything" placeholder="Type anything here">
<input type="submit" name="anything_submit" value="Submit">
</form>
</p>
</body>
Excerpt from done.html:
<body>
<h3>Results:</h3>
<p>
{{ display }}
</p>
</body>
Any help would be greatly appreciated, I hope this example helps.
This can be done by using a div that contains a 'loading gif' image. When the submit button is clicked, the div is displayed using javascript.
To implement this, you can take a look at this website: How to show a loading gif image while a page loads using javascript and Css