delay before cflocation

Ian,
that static sleep method is pretty neat. I keep forgetting that we have access to all the standard java objects now with CFMX.

You can't ahve a <cfflush> before a <cflocation>. Nor can you output
anything on the browser prior to a <cflocation>.

<cflocation> sends a 302 redirect code to the browser, which tells the
browser "go to this URL instead". The browser does that. It does not
render any body of the response once it sees the 302 in the header.

You can effect the same sort of thing, though, by doing this:
- output some stuff
- <cfflush>
- Use java.lang.Thread's sleep() method to pause for a bit (note, this
pause occurs on the SERVER not the browser, but it can amount to the same
thing).
- Use Javascript to relocate to a different URL.

Or you can use a <meta> tag to "refresh" the browser to a new URL after a
period of time. This is perhaps better, as it all happens on the browser,
whereas the steps above are a bit of a mishmash.

--
Adam

Check out <cfflush...> in the docs. This allows CF to stream the
response back to the client, rather then wait until the entire response
is complete. But it does have limitations and conflicts with other tags
because of the way it changes the response behavior.

You may also want to be aware of the ability to put CF to sleep for
awhile. I tiny bit of Java can be employed to pause the processing of a
thread by CF.

<cfset thread = CreateObject("java", "java.lang.Thread")>
About to sleep for 5 seconds...<cfflush>
<cfset thread.sleep(5000)>
Done sleeping.

How to make ColdFusion MX go to sleep
http://www.petefreitag.com/item/85.cfm
Many people have had the need for a ColdFusion page to sleep, typically
between iterations of a loop. There is a tag called CFX_Sleep in the Tag
Gallery, but in ColdFusion MX you don't need a CFX tag to make the
current processing thread sleep using the static sleep method on the
java.lang.Thread class, part of the standard java platform. Because CFMX
doesn't allow us to call a static method without an object reference, we
have to first use CreateObject, or CFOBJECT to get an instance of a
java.lang.Thread object. We then call the Thread.sleep(long) method,
which takes in the number of miliseconds to sleep for.

Why not pop up a javascript window when you submit your report form that has your "running report" message and then close it when your report script finishes running?

Otherwise, you could experiment using <cfflush>, but it sounds like cfflush has problems when you use other CF methods that alter the HTTP headers (i.e. cflocation).

If you just want CF to delay until a file exists, you could do something like this:

<cfloop from="1" to="80000" index="i">
<cfif FileExists("C:\Some\File\Path.ext")>
<cfbreak>
</cfif>
</cfloop>
<cflocation url="MyFileLocation.cfm">