Widget Auto-refresh

What is Auto-Refresh

At runtime, when the Dashboard loads in the browser, data is fetched from the data sources and Widgets are drawn.
After this, if the user doesn’t interact with the Dashboard, no new data is fetched and the data displayed can become outdated.

Instead, when Auto-refresh is configured, new data is fetched at regular intervals without needing user intervention.

*This is useful for example when Dashboards are displayed on a TV screen without mouse and keyboard.

Auto-refresh ? Buffer refresh ?

Auto-refresh will perform the same action on data as a manual refresh of the web page.
This may be insufficient to get new data if your Connections are bufferized.
For more information on the Buffer and how to refresh it, see the relevant Chapter in the Connecting to Data chapter.

Important note on Performance

!Setting a small Auto-refresh interval will make more queries to the data.
Your system (databases, network, I/O, …) needs to be able to support as many queries as ( number of open widgets with Auto-refresh ) X ( frequency of Auto-refresh ).
Make sure to do stress and performance tests for your application to scale appropriately.

*The Auto-refresh system will perform decently with simultaneously 20 open Dashboards containing each 20 data measures (data points), and 10 Users, when using the recommended hardware pre-requisites.

The minimum allowed Time Interval is 30s.
This is for performance reasons on the web server as well as the data server when many users will leave open an auto-refreshed dashboard.

Use this setting sensibly, considering the number of queries that can result from many users leaving the dashboard open on different computers.

Configuring Auto-refresh

To configure Auto-refresh, use the title bar button Refresh Settings… :

In the configuration dialog, check Enable Auto Refresh and set a time Interval :

*Each widget can be enabled or not for auto refresh.