Is there a way to pass results generated within a PHP page (called into action by an ajax post request) back to the document in bits / intervals?
Here is an example...
I am making an ajax POST to a PHP document with keywords passed by the user which scans a few sites to determine if they have resources for the search. If they do the PHP file returns a link to the site, and continues to the next one, if not I will just continue on to the next one..
with an ajax (I use jQuery) I can make this request and wait for the page to load, and then show all the links together easilly, but am wondering if I can display the links one by one as they load from the PHP file so that I don't have to wait for every page to be checked.
Thank you for your input.
You can implement this by having the client send a request for the first X (5 or whatever) results, display those, and then immediately send the request for the next X records. Your client will simply continue making requests and displaying records until it gets an empty response, at which point retrieval is complete.
To make this work you either need to maintain state on the server so that you know "where" in the search to pick up searching, or the client needs to include sufficient information in each AJAX request for the server to know how to continue processing.
By the way, this seems more like a GET operation than a POST.