Do something every X seconds

[squiblo]

Hello, what I want to do is call a function every X seconds, I can do this when staying on 1 page without navigating off, but my problem is that I want to call the function every X seconds even if the user is moving from page to page and I do not know how this can be done.

 

For example I want to call the function every 20 seconds, I am on the homepage for 10 seconds, then move to the help page, then I only have to wait another 10 seconds before the function is called.

 

Any help?

 

Thanks

[shlumph]

If you can, build it in such a way that a cron would work. Since HTTP is stateless, this would be reasonable.

 

Or, a far less reliable way, would be to make use of AJAX calls.

[squiblo]

Unfortunately I do not know how to make a cron, so I looked for a generator, that only went down to minutes not seconds I'm not having much luck

[Maq]

There may be a better way but you can use a combination these two lines in a recursive manner to achieve what you want.

 

t=setTimeout("yourFunction()", 20000);

 

and

 

clearTimeout(t);

[Alex]

You can use setInterval() and store the last time the function was called in a cookie to transfer the time between pages.

[.josh]

In general, 20s is not a long time...is there a reason it can't just be reset on page load? It would be far easier for you to just start the process over on a new page load...my first suggestion is for you to reconsider whether it's really necessary to carry over a timeout of that short of time from page to page.  if it is something you absolutely need to do, then as AlexWD mentioned, I'd also store the last call time in a cookie and draw from that from page to page.