I have a countdown on an auction site, that resets to 2 minutes when someone places a bid within the last two minutes of the auction. This part works as it should. What I need, is to reload the page when someone hits the bid-button, so that someone else wathing the counter, sees the counter reset, without hitting F5.
I've tried different things, like a meta tag that refreshes the page, javascript functions with counters, etc...
However, if someone needs to see the counter refresh immediately after a bid has been placed, the page needs to be refreshed every second, and that sucks...
So, I figured, if it is possible to have the page reload at a given interval using ex. a meta tag, would it be possible to do the same only when some event is fired?
Anyone with some tricks up their sleeves?
Thnx
If you are concerned with the frequency with which you will be generating server requests using a polling model, then you could perhaps look into a Comet (a.k.a. Reverse Ajax, Ajax push) based solution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_%28programming%29
Simply explained you rely on an implementation where you fire a single DoYouHaveAnUpdateEvent request from the page to the server and simply avoid responding to the request until there is actually an UpdateEvent. Upon receiving the UpdateEvent response, the page issues a new DoYouHaveAnUpdateEvent request