Mongrel users - Sep 2006 - Mongrel Upload Progress 0.2 -- With Instructions and Examples

Hi Folks,

I''m sure tons of people are gonna ruin a whole drawer of their best
panties over this one.

Rick Olson worked on the mongrel_upload_progress gem, documentation and
examples and has almost everything you need to do progress tracked file
uploads using just Mongrel to handle the upload.  This means that Rails
(or any other framework) isn''t blocked while the upload happens, and
that the user gets nice status.

Here''s Rick''s blog post:

http://weblog.techno-weenie.net/2006/9/4/mongrel-upload-progress-documentation

You can watch a snazzy video of Rick playing with it at:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/techno-weenie-screencasts/mongrel_drb.mov

Then you can read the instructions and get sample code from:

http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/docs/upload_progress.html

Which includes installation instructions, sample rhtml forms,
javascript, and Rails actions to get you started.  It''s not limited to
Rails though, that''s just the example Rick did, since, well, Rick does
Rails.

This is still early, so patches and suggestions are welcome.

And everyone should thank Rick and _why_t_l_s for working on this with
me at RailsConf, and especially Rick for doing the heavy lifting of
integrating it with Rails and documenting it.

WRITING PLUGINS

The m_u_p gem is also a good example of writing a fairly complex plugin
for Mongrel that is easy to install.  Take a look if you want to do
similar fancy hackery.

-- 
Zed A. Shaw
http://www.zedshaw.com/
http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/
http://www.lingr.com/room/3yXhqKbfPy8 -- Come get help.

Hello all,

Is it just me or are the upload plugin instructions all buggy? I had to 
change the following bits of code:

- FilesController#progress: #check is an instance method if the 
Singleton Mongrel::Uploads, so Uploads.instance.check instead of 
Uploads.check.

   def progress
     render :update do |page|
       @status = Mongrel::Uploads.instance.check(params[:upload_id])
       page.upload_progress.update(@status[''size''],
@status[''received''])
if @status
     end
   end

- Progressbar would not show at first. I had to fix the javascript at 
least in one place:

      update: function(status, statusHTML) {
        this.statusText.innerHTML = statusHTML;
+      this.statusBar.style.width = '''' +
Math.floor(this.statusBarWidth
* status) + ''px'';
-      this.statusBar.style.width = Math.floor(this.statusBarWidth * 
status);
      }

- Not a problem of the instructions per se, but worth mentioning: 
Lighttpd seems to buffer the whole upload and then send it all at once 
to a proxied mongrel instance behind it. So that won''t give you any 
progress bar at all. Pound as a frontend behaves much better.

I hope to be of help with this tale of experience made. Really nice work 
on the plugin guys, thank you a lot. Zed, thanks for Mongrel, it has 
given me confidence about rails deployment for the first time - have 
tried all other magic bullets, and most of them didn''t quite work.

best regards
kaspar

neotrivium.com - the swiss ruby shop

On 9/12/06, Kaspar Schiess <eule at space.ch>
wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> Is it just me or are the upload plugin instructions all buggy? I had to
> change the following bits of code:
>
> - FilesController#progress: #check is an instance method if the
> Singleton Mongrel::Uploads, so Uploads.instance.check instead of
> Uploads.check.
>
>    def progress
>      render :update do |page|
>        @status = Mongrel::Uploads.instance.check(params[:upload_id])
>        page.upload_progress.update(@status[''size''],
@status[''received''])
> if @status
>      end
>    end
>
> - Progressbar would not show at first. I had to fix the javascript at
> least in one place:
>
>       update: function(status, statusHTML) {
>         this.statusText.innerHTML = statusHTML;
> +      this.statusBar.style.width = '''' +
Math.floor(this.statusBarWidth
> * status) + ''px'';
> -      this.statusBar.style.width = Math.floor(this.statusBarWidth *
> status);
>       }
>
> - Not a problem of the instructions per se, but worth mentioning:
> Lighttpd seems to buffer the whole upload and then send it all at once
> to a proxied mongrel instance behind it. So that won''t give you
any
> progress bar at all. Pound as a frontend behaves much better.
>
> I hope to be of help with this tale of experience made. Really nice work
> on the plugin guys, thank you a lot. Zed, thanks for Mongrel, it has
> given me confidence about rails deployment for the first time - have
> tried all other magic bullets, and most of them didn''t quite work.
>
> best regards
> kaspar
>
> neotrivium.com - the swiss ruby shop
I don''t know, I made that video with that exact code.


-- 
Rick Olson
http://weblog.techno-weenie.net
http://mephistoblog.com

On Tue, 2006-09-12 at 11:15 +0200, Kaspar Schiess wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> Is it just me or are the upload plugin instructions all buggy? I had to 
> change the following bits of code:
> 
> - FilesController#progress: #check is an instance method if the 
> Singleton Mongrel::Uploads, so Uploads.instance.check instead of 
> Uploads.check.
> 
You sure you''re using the right version?  You need the stuff available
currently from the pre-release. So, if you didn''t do:

gem install mongrel mongrel_upload_progress
--source=http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/releases/

Then you''ve got the wrong one.
> - Not a problem of the instructions per se, but worth mentioning: 
> Lighttpd seems to buffer the whole upload and then send it all at once 
> to a proxied mongrel instance behind it. So that won''t give you
any
> progress bar at all. Pound as a frontend behaves much better.
> 
Interesting to know.  I know Rick uses litespeed so I''m curious what he
gets.
> I hope to be of help with this tale of experience made. Really nice work 
> on the plugin guys, thank you a lot. Zed, thanks for Mongrel, it has 
> given me confidence about rails deployment for the first time - have 
> tried all other magic bullets, and most of them didn''t quite work.
Thanks Kaspar.  Much appreciated.


-- 
Zed A. Shaw
http://www.zedshaw.com/
http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/
http://www.lingr.com/room/3yXhqKbfPy8 -- Come get help.