I have a very long page that dynamically loads images as users scroll through.
However, if a user quickly scrolls away from a certain part of the page, I don\'t want
You can load your images using ajax calls, and in case that the uses scrolls-out, you can abort the calls.
In jQuery pseudo-code it would be something like that (forgive me mistakes in syntax, it is just an example):
1) tag images that you want to load
$(".image").each( function(){
if ( is_in_visible_area(this) ) { // check [1] for example
$(this).addClass("load_me");
} else {
$(this).addClass("dont_load");
}
});
2) load images
ajax_requests = {};
$(".image.load_me").each( function(){
// load image
var a = $.ajax({
url: 'give_me_photos.php',
data: {img: photo_id},
success: function(html){
photo_by_id(photo_id), img.append(html);
}
});
ajax_requests[photo_id] = a;
});
3) cancel loading those out of the screen
for( id in ajax_requests ) {
if ( ! is_in_visible_area(id) ) {
ajax_requests[id].abort();
}
}
Of course, add also some checking if the image is already loaded (e.g. class "loaded")
[1]. Check if element is visible after scrolling
[2]. Abort Ajax requests using jQuery
Maybe you could serve the image through a php script which would check a field in the the db (or better yet a memcached) that would indicate stop loading. the script would portion up the image into chunks and pause in between each chunk and check if the stop flag for the particular request is. If it is set you send the header with A 204 no content which as soon as the browser gets it will stop receiving.
This may be a bit over kill though.
Well, my idea:
1) initiate an AJAX request for the image, if it succeeds, the image goes to the browser cache, and once you set the 'src' attribute, the image is shown from the cache
2) you can abort the XHR
I wrote a tiny server with express emulating the huge image download (it actually just waits 20 seconds, then returns an image). Then I have this in my HTML:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<style>
img {
width: 469px;
height: 428px;
background-color: #CCC;
border: 1px solid #999;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<img data-src="./img" src="" />
<br />
<a id="cancel" href="javascript:void(0)">CANCEL</a>
<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script>
$(function () {
var xhr, img = $('img'), src = img.data('src');
xhr = $.ajax(src, {
success: function (data) { img.attr('src', src) }
});
$('#cancel').click(function (){
xhr.abort();
})
});
</script>
</body>
</html>
BTW, another idea that might work:
1) create a new iframe
2) inside of the iframe have the script that starts loading the image, and once it's loaded, call the .parent
's method
3) when in need, stop the iframe content loading using .stop
on the iframe object
What you are trying to do is the wrong approach, as mentioned by nrabinowitz. You can't just "cancel" the loading process of an image (setting the src
attribute to an empty string is not a good idea). In fact, even if you could, doing so would only make things worst, as your server would continually send data that would get cancelled, increasing it's load factor and slow it down. Also, consider this:
Often, computer problems are simply design problems.
** EDIT **
Here's an idea :
your page should display DIV
containers with the width and height of the expected image size (use CSS to style). Inside of each DIV
, add an link. For example :
<div class="img-wrapper thumbnail">
<a href="http://www.domain.com/path/to/image">Loading...</a>
</div>
Add this Javascript (untested, the idea is self describing)
$(function() {
var imgStack;
var loadTimeout;
$(window).scroll(function() {
imgStack = null;
if (loadTimeout) clearTimeout(loadTimeout);
loadTimeout = setTimeout(function() {
// get all links visible in the view port
// should be an array or jQuery object
imgStack = ...
loadNextImage();
}, 200); // 200 ms delay
});
function loadNextImage() {
if (imgStack && imgStack.length) {
var nextLink = $(imgStack.pop()); // get next image element
$('<img />').attr('src', nextLink.attr('href'))
.appendTo(nextLink.parent())
.load(function() {
loadNextImage();
});
// remove link from container (so we don't precess it twice)
nextLink.remove();
}
};
});
The solution could be a webworker. a webworker can be terminated and with him the connection. But there is a small problem that the webworker uses the limited connections of the browser so the application will be blocked.
Right now I'm working on a solution with serviceWorkers - they don't have a connection limit (I hope so)