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Using ASP and HTML Meta TAGS To Make A Dynamic Delay Message

This is a little trick to display a timed message to the user after doing some sort of task. By mixing some creative ASP with a simple HTML META Refresh you can display a message to a user for a specified period of time and then redirect them back to wherever you want.

META tags with an HTTP-EQUIV attribute are equivalent to HTTP headers. Usually, they control the action of browsers, and may be used to refine the information provided by the actual headers.

Here is how it works.

After completing some sort of ASP code. ( Possibly a database update ).

You can redirect the user like so to the delay page.

First, turn on buffering because you'll probably need it depending on where in your page you redirect.

Put this at the top of your page before the <HTML> Tag.
<% Response.Buffer = True %>

Then when you are ready to send the user to the delay page do something like this.

<% MYMESSAGE = Server.URLEncode("Adding New Product....Please Wait") %>
<% Response.Redirect ("delay.asp?DELAY_TIME=3&DELAY_MESSAGE=" & MYMESSAGE & "&REDIRECT_URL=default.asp") %>

As you see can see there are 3 variables we send to the delay page.

DELAY_TIME
REDIRECT_URL
DELAY_MESSAGE

Then the delay.asp page would consist of the following code.

<%@ LANGUAGE="VBSCRIPT" %>
<%
DELAY_TIME = Request("DELAY_TIME")
REDIRECT_URL = Request("REDIRECT_URL")
DELAY_MESSAGE = Request("DELAY_MESSAGE")
%>
<html>

<head>
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="<% =DELAY_TIME %>; URL=<% =REDIRECT_URL %>">
<title>Delay</title>
</head>

<body color="#FFFFFF">

<% =DELAY_MESSAGE %>

</body>
</html>

Why would you want to do this ?.. That's up to you, it's just a cool little trick I've used a few times.

ASP (Active Server Pages) is a technology developed by Microsoft. Pages using ASP are primarily developed in JScript, or VBScript and are integrated into the HTML of your Web pages. The ASP code is compiled on-the-fly by the server and the resulting output is standard HTML. By using ASP, Web pages can be dynamic, full of ever-changing content, and browser independent.