Visualforce - Beyond Basics Series 37 - Let user know what is happening

How much patience user has ?

In the modern cloud systems, nearly most of the Applications are hosted in cloud, user started having variety of Applications to use for a particular task. So, the user experience is must. User has less patience these days, so we need to develop applications that treat them as their first class citizens.

What is the maximum time user can wait ?

As per standard, the maximum wait time for a response during UI interation is 1 sec. Though, it seems very low, it is possible to achieve this standard very easily.

Best practice to enhance user experience ?

There might be case where we can't respond back to the user within 1 sec slot. In that case, at least we must report the progress to the user in the form of Progress bar, Status Message or even a Loader image.

How to achieve that ?

Most of the time when the processing can't be responded with Progress value in the Screen, Loader image will be used. In visualforce, actionstatus is used for that purpose. It offers two ways of reporting status message,

1.   Start & Stop Text Message
2.   Start & Stop component

Where is the Code ?

I have seen many developers using startText & stopText attribute in action status to display the message. But, it's very rare to use the facet tag to provide the start & stop component that will be displayed when the action takes place. So, i have illustrated with an example, where it will show a loader image on Start & shows a success image at the Stop phase.

Any Screenshots ?

When the request sent,

After the response received,

Walk through in a video ?