How to get progress from XMLHttpRequest

For the bytes uploaded it is quite easy. Just monitor the xhr.upload.onprogress event. The browser knows the size of the files it has to upload and the size of the uploaded data, so it can provide the progress info.

For the bytes downloaded (when getting the info with xhr.responseText), it is a little bit more difficult, because the browser doesn’t know how many bytes will be sent in the server request. The only thing that the browser knows in this case is the size of the bytes it is receiving.

There is a solution for this, it’s sufficient to set a Content-Length header on the server script, in order to get the total size of the bytes the browser is going to receive.

For more go to https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Using_XMLHttpRequest .

Example:
My server script reads a zip file (it takes 5 seconds):

$filesize=filesize('test.zip');

header("Content-Length: " . $filesize); // set header length
// if the headers is not set then the evt.loaded will be 0
readfile('test.zip');
exit 0;

Now I can monitor the download process of the server script, because I know it’s total length:

function updateProgress(evt) 
{
   if (evt.lengthComputable) 
   {  // evt.loaded the bytes the browser received
      // evt.total the total bytes set by the header
      // jQuery UI progress bar to show the progress on screen
     var percentComplete = (evt.loaded / evt.total) * 100;  
     $('#progressbar').progressbar( "option", "value", percentComplete );
   } 
}   
function sendreq(evt) 
{  
    var req = new XMLHttpRequest(); 
    $('#progressbar').progressbar();    
    req.onprogress = updateProgress;
    req.open('GET', 'test.php', true);  
    req.onreadystatechange = function (aEvt) {  
        if (req.readyState == 4) 
        {  
             //run any callback here
        }  
    };  
    req.send(); 
}