For a recent project I’m working on we had a requirement to be able to process long-running tasks in Django triggered by user interaction on the front-end. For instance, the user would click a button on the web page in order to trigger the back-end to, for example, build a CSV file containing a subset of the data in the database. In the browser a little popup window would get displayed, showing the progress of the task in the back-end. Once the task got completed in the back-end the user would be notified in the front-end of its completion and provided a link to download the final output (e.g. the built CSV file). (read more…)