I have a display with 3 looping regions (images, 5 sec each) and 1 static region with a dataset (86 400 sec). This is a menu.
When we update the data set, we have to re-schedule the layout for it to refresh. Otherwhise, I have to put my dataset to 5 min but it will flikr every 5 minutes and it doesn’t look great.
I was wondering, is there a way to have a button or something to ask a player to refresh? When we do modify a layout, it does so automatically. Would there be a way to easily make this same reload appen on request without having to go trough publishing or layout updating ? Reason is the Restaurant owner often have to make changes to their dataset, but I want it to be simple for them to force a refresh.
So the refresh is happening in the background, but because the layout schedule didn’t change and the layout is still running then the old version is shown.
In 1.8, assuming you configure XMR then there will be a button to press to force the Player to collect new content and advance to the next layout.
Otherwise as you say you’ll need to adjust the schedule in order for the refresh to happen. We can’t add a button to do that as we can’t guess what an appropriate adjustment would be to make.
In the background, the player look for what to know that the layout has changed? Is there a version key or something? If so, creatin a button to just update that key would make it refresh! If so, could we create a simple module for this?
The Player knows the layout changed because when it polls for new content, the checksum on the layout xlf file differs. However you’re modifying a dataset not the layout.
So at the layout level, all that happens is the layout says ‘use a dataset here’. Fetching that happens at the point that the media item starts to run.
Because you’ve put a long duration on the dataset view then the dataset is only fetched once per day and so the Player has no idea that the content has been updated, nor does it have any way to find out.
XMR enables the CMS to push a message to the player in real time to tell it to update. Until that’s in place you would either need to alter the layout (with the option to expire modified layouts enabled for that Player) or you would need to shorten the duration of the dataset view.
Please be very careful directly modifying the database though. It’s unsupported. Some of the uuids referenced in the XLF need to match against various other tables in the database.
Use case - Banquet hall room signage. I’ve set them up with datasets, but I have to force the ticker to update every X seconds. I had it set at a long interval because I hate the flickering of the text.
I see that XMR forces an update of the dataset whenever I make a change. It would be awesome if it intelligently reloaded region/widget as well. We’d then have instantaneous updates! I don’t mind the flicker on an update
