Creating a file progress bar in PHP

Question

Does anyone know of any methods to create a file upload progress bar in PHP? I have often heard that it's impossible.

I have one idea, but not sure if it would work: have a normal file upload, but instead submit to an iframe. When this is submitted, store the file information (size and temp location) in the session. At the same time, start an AJAX call to every say 10 seconds to check the size of the file compared to the size stored in the session. This would return the size to the AJAX and then a progress bar would be sized and maybe display the uploaded size to the user.

Thoughts?

Answer 1

You're pretty much figured out how to do it. The main problem is you usually don't have access to the size of the uploaded file until it's done uploading.

There are workarounds for this: Enabling APC, you to access this information if you include a field called "APC_UPLOAD_PROGRESS" and use apc_fetch() for retrieving a cache entry with the status.

There's also a plugin called uploadprogress but it's not very well documented and doesn't work on Windows (last I checked anyway).

An alternative is to use Flash for doing it. See scripts like FancyUpload.

Before APC came along I had to write a CGI script in C that wrote information to a text file. APC seems like a much better way to do it now though.

Hope this helps.