Is there a common name for this "session locking" method?

On one of my pages I have users queue up search terms to be to queried from a 3rd party API. As they're building the queue, my site is making the queries in t开发者_Python百科he background (through ajax) so I can cache the responses, saving them time when they submit. I store a session variable $_SESSION['isloading'] as true during the time that the background queries are running, and its false when they're done.

When they submit, the results page waits for $_SESSION['isloading'] to be false before querying the cache for result. Meanwhile they're shown a progress wheel.

Is there a name for this technique of using a session to locally "lock" a user before proceeding to the next step in the code? I came up with this approach on my own and was wondering if it is a common (or good) solution to this problem, and is used elsewhere.

Putting it in $_SESSION will be a wasted effort. Been there, done that and it didn't work out.

You will be much better off if you provide your "search query string" in as a $_GET variable for your XHR ( marketing people call it - Ajax ).

Off the top of my head, this sounds a little similar to the way some older forum software performs forum searches in the background, and the visible page does a repeated refresh until the background search is complete.

I don't think there's a name for it; I'm also note entirely convinced that it's a great solution. As stevecomrie pointed out, you're going to run into difficulties with concurrency (unless the session variable's name is unique per search query).

I'd instead recommend an XmlHttpRequest (as teresko points out, it's not really called "AJAX", ugh!) and you can handle the "waiting" quite simply with Javascript.

I asked about this on IRC (Hat-Tip to ##php on freenode), and they suggested I just make the search form and search results one page. Then, when they're done entering their searches the view would change rather than submitting to the next page. This would remove the necessity of keeping track of an 'isloading' state. This seems like a better approach to me, are there any problems with it?