Slow process, fast rendering
Imagine someone edits a page, and that editing hits a very slow
tag-function of some kind. You want to respond fast with something
readable, some kind of temporary page until the slow process has finished.
Do you chose to reuse what you had from the last revision, if it the
content of the function hasn't changed, or do you respond with a note that
you are still processing? The temporary page could then update missing
content through an API.
I assume that a plain rerender of the page will occur after the actual
content is updated and available, i.e. a rerender will only happen some
time after the edit and the slow process would then be done. A last step of
the process could then be to purge the temporary page.
This work almost everywhere, but not for collections, they don't know about
temporary pages. Is there some mechanism implemented that does this or
something similar? It feels like something that should have a general
solution.
There are at least two different use cases; one where some existing
information gets augmented with external data (without really changing the
content), and one where some external data (could be content) gets added to
existing content. An example of the first could be verification of
references, wile the later could be natural language generation.
/jeblad