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 will definately want to go with digitgerald's FancyUpload. It's Mootools & swfuplaod based, and it sports a nice queue with statusses, progress, eta etc. It's really the slickest method i've seen for uploading files. For my personal use case ivé used it to let the client select 1.2 gb of PDF files and upload them. Newer ones get renamed and versioned automatically, same are skipped, etc.

Answer 2

You can try YUI or Prototype or JQuery

Answer 3

So far, the most common way of doing this is SWFUpload: http://www.swfupload.org/

However, it is possible with pure PHP, just very difficult and very experimental. I'll see if I can find the link.

Edit: According to comments on php.net, as of 5.2 there is a hook to handle upload progress. http://us.php.net/features.file-upload#71564

More explanation:

• http://www.dinke.net/blog/2006/11/04/php-52-upload-progress-meter/en/
• http://blog.liip.ch/archive/2006/09/10/upload-progress-meter-extension-for-php-5-2.html

Rasmus' Example:

• http://progphp.com/progress.phps