Dataset view and embedded widgets not playing nice together

To be completed by the original poster:

CMS Version

2.3.3

Player Type

Windows

Player Version

V2 R254.1

Issue

This is likely an oversight on my part rather than a bug, I am leaning towards widget duration but really looking for suggestions.

I have a layout with 2 regions, 1 with a dataset view widget and the other has embedded html widget.
the embed widget has a script running onload to download and display data from a google spreadsheet (there are also buttons that filter the data being displayed, which work perfectly, and the reason for using embedded rather than dataset)

my dataset uses the same url as the embed widget but is only looking at 1 column of data, a column of urls to images, the dataset view widget displays the image from that column. again, this works.

my problem however, is with updating the data - the data itself can be updated live and will change multiple times a day, but the player doesn’t seem to want to update as regularly. the data is a list of names that has a date and time range assigned to it, it should only be displayed between the hours defined, the spreadsheet handles this by only making the relevant entries available to the display/dataset. the part that isn’t working correctly is when the dataset view has an image in it, the embedded widget won’t re-run the script to download the latest content, so I can get stuck with a list of names that are hours old.

I have since disabled the dataset from updating, and the list of names accurately changes within a minute or 2 as expected. This leads me to think the dataset view is causing the problem, there may be 100’s of rows of data, but each row has the exact same image URL, I only need 1 of them to be displayed (side note, I have had several notifications from the CMS “Display is downloading 1 files too many times”), which is why I’m thinking its a widget duration issue, the dataset view is trying to display every image so the duration blows out hundreds of times longer than the set value of 1 minute which in turn is stopping the embedded widget from expiring>updating. Even when the dataset has updated with new content, the current layout wont expire because it wants to complete everything in the dataset view - this is the way I’m making sense of it at least.

So how do I fix it? thoughts:
scrap the dataset view/dataset entirely - find another way to download and display the image (locally on the display rather than via CMS)
modify the dataset in some way - prevent it from downloading duplicates
edit the dataset view - set a strict duration, to force the region to expire every couple of minutes

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated - even if drastically different from my current approach

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