Drop-in replacement for your existing AJAX requests that provides progression callbacks.

When performing cross-server AJAX requests today, there is little feedback on progress.

This library provides server requests via real posts to a hidden frame and uses HTTP/1.1 chunked transfer encoding to provide progression events duing send.

See blog posts in English or Danish.

Here

• .NET 4.0+ (reporting via HTTP available via LittleConvoyActionAttribute class)
• ASP.NET MVC 3+

First, specify LittleConvoy as a dependency:

PM> Install-Package LittleConvoy

Second, take your exiting JSON emitting controller methods and decorate them with this attribute:

using LittleConvoy.TestSite.Utilities;

namespace LittleConvoy.TestSite.Controllers
{
  public class DemoController : Controller
  {
    [LittleConvoyAction(StartPercent = 0)]
    public ActionResult Echo(object source)
    {
      return new JsonNetResult {Data = source, JsonRequestBehavior = JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet};
    }
  }
}

After that add the client to your project (included in the package) via require or by including build/client.js and calling it from JavaScript:

new clientLib.LittleConvoy.Client('HiddenFrame').send({ url: 'http://littleconvoy.devchamp.com/demo/echo', delay: 0 }, { Hello: 'World'})
  .progressed(function (progress) {
      console.log('Progress from server: ' + progress + '%');
    })
    .then(function (data) {
      console.log('Done, recieved data: ' + data)
   })
    .catch(function (message) {
      return alert('unable to contact server:\n' + message);
    });

The string 'HiddenFrame' is the selected transport, only HiddenFrame is available for now.

Note that the default number of progression callbacks is 10. Hello world is the data that is send to the server.

POST/GET method can be specified, default is POST.

The Library contains a small Promise library which can easy be converted to the promise lib of your choice. The delay parameter can be used for debugging purposes, adding a number of milliseconds on the server side for each request.

• In Internet Explorer it only works in 10+ for now, 8 & 9 is work in progress.
• There is a ~600 bytes overhead compared to classic requests.
• The send request with the chunked http is a hack in the ASPNET MVC pipeline, so if you are using other custom MVC filters they may fail. That said, Microsoft Internet Information Server does not seem to care and any pipeline modules like gzip/deflate compression still works.