Launching backend jobs in the web ui

[Hayden Young]

I have a couple of components which retrieve information from a remote location on a regular basis and have captured this functionality in cli tools using JApplicationCli (similar to how smart search's indexing works from the CLI). This is great for large recordsets but sometimes I envisage users simply wanting to run a quick retrieval from the component's admin ui (again in a similar way to how smart search allows for admin users to run an index by clicking the "Index" button in the Smart Search component's indexed items area).

I'm wondering if there is an API available for this kind of functionality or even just a best practices how-to which could assist in achieving such functionality using Joomla. I have looked at the smart search component's functionality but am not exactly sure how they are managing launching an indexing process separate from the "Index" modal and then using Ajax to report back to the modal window as to the progress of the indexer.

Any help much appreciated.

Hayden