I'm currently maintaining an e-commerce site which I didn't code myself. The ordering process uses xml requests to speak to a box-office type backend that does the actual payment processing for the website as well as phone orders etc.
At the minute, the checkout process works as follows:
1. Fill in card details -> sent via POST to order processing script.
2. Processing script checks if you've hit the page before, if not, it sends you to a temporary page with an animated "processing" gif.
3. This page has a meta refresh of 1 second, so it immediately accesses the order processing script again, this time it's already shown the temp page, so it starts the actual transaction processing, sends the xml request and waits for a return, which could take up to two minutes while the card is verified. When it gets a return, it will continue and show the order confirmation html.
The problem is, in between displaying the temp "processing" page with the meta-refresh and it loading any html for the confirmation, IE will stop the animation on the gif because you've already left the page (firefox continues to display the animation until the script starts to send the confirmation html to the browser).
So, my question is, how is this normally done (without AJAX) if you don't know how long the card check is going to take?
At the minute, the checkout process works as follows:
1. Fill in card details -> sent via POST to order processing script.
2. Processing script checks if you've hit the page before, if not, it sends you to a temporary page with an animated "processing" gif.
3. This page has a meta refresh of 1 second, so it immediately accesses the order processing script again, this time it's already shown the temp page, so it starts the actual transaction processing, sends the xml request and waits for a return, which could take up to two minutes while the card is verified. When it gets a return, it will continue and show the order confirmation html.
The problem is, in between displaying the temp "processing" page with the meta-refresh and it loading any html for the confirmation, IE will stop the animation on the gif because you've already left the page (firefox continues to display the animation until the script starts to send the confirmation html to the browser).
So, my question is, how is this normally done (without AJAX) if you don't know how long the card check is going to take?