GeoExpress 7 was released this past January, and despite the fact that it has met with enthusiastic approval by users and reviewers, it is a product made by humans, and humans on a tight schedule at that. One of the things we were dissatisfied with even as ‘Geo 7′ went out the door was that in one of the new features – publishing images directly to Express Server from GeoExpress – the application appears to hang.

It doesn’t really hang, but the progress meter reaches 100% and then nothing happens for a while.

What’s going on here is that once the images have been uploaded, Express Server then ports them to their specified target. That can take some time. In publishing really large images or lots of small ones, it can be a really long time.

The fix for the misalignment in the meter is not a fully known entity, but it looks like this is a server-side issue, something we’d need to address with a future release of Express Server. In the meantime we decided to add a message in Geo 7 to the effect that ‘Please wait…Express Server is still working’, but in the attempt to do this we found that it involved some incompatibilities with the way we present other messages. We could find no way to do the right thing in the time we had left.

We momentarily considered some inelegant hacks, but because this didn’t appear to be a dealbreaker, better sense prevailed. We’re tracking the issue and we wrote a knowledge base article about it, which basically says what I’ve told you here. That KB article will be updated when there’s more to tell.

For now, be aware that the extra time after the progress meter shows completion may be as much as 30% of the original upload time.