No you cannot do what alert does. This limitation is really annoying in some cases but if your problem is just a progress for a single long computation then the solution is simple.
Instead of doing alll the records in one single loop break the computation in "small enough" chunks and then do something like
function doit()
{
processBlockOfRecords();
updateProgressBar();
if (!finished()) {
setTimeout(doit, 0);
}
}
setTimeout(doit, 0);
With this approach is also simple to add an "abort" button to stop the computation.
In your example the loop is
$.each(plantillas, function(_index, _item){
updateBar(_item.Centro_de_trabajo);
calculateItem(_item,_index);
a.push("<div class='blockee'><ul>"+ /*temp.join("")*/ t(_item) +"</ul></div>");
});
so the computation could be split with (untested)
function processRecords(plantillas, completion_callback) {
var processed = 0;
var result = [];
function doit() {
// Process up to 20 records at a time
for (var i=0; i<20 && processed<plantillas.length; i++) {
calculateItem(plantillas[processed], processed);
result.push("<div class='blockee'><ul>" +
t(plantillas[processed]) +
"</ul></div>");
processed++;
}
// Progress bar update
updateProgress(processed, plantillas.length);
if (processed < plantillas.length) {
// Not finished, schedule another block
setTimeout(doit, 0);
} else {
// Processing complete... inform caller
if (completion_callback) completion_callback(result);
}
}
// Schedule computation start
setTimeout(doit, 0);
}