Updating Dashboard for Live Information

[Harry]

Hello Board!

 

Firstly, Thank you for all of your input so far. I have recently installed FMS13 and rolled out our small application to 10 users. I have come on leaps and bounds in the last few months and now our FM solution is becoming more and more useful and powerful every week.

 

My issue:

I have built a Dashboard type display that shows the sums of quantities for each day. It works well. It is driven off a Global Field  'Date'. This is an editable field, a drop down calender. The user selects the day and then the dashboard shows the previous 30 days.

 

I want to put a big TV up in our office so everyone can view these KPI's instantly and get live feedback. I have 'Today_Percentage' in big letters.

 

That field, a calc field, doesn't update until i go in and select the 'g_Date' field again.

 

How can i get that to update? Should i build a script on our server that does a Get(CurrentDate) inot that field every minute? Will it work for all sessions?

 

I'm just not sure how to approach it. I've spent a week setting up all the Day tables, Summaries and Calcs and i can't get my head around this!!

 

Thank you again for any insight you can give.

 

Harry

[Matthew F]

 

 

Should i build a script on our server that does a Get(CurrentDate) inot that field every minute?

Sounds like kind of a hack, but sure, why not?  You could use the "Install On Timer" script step to accomplish this.   Maybe a little button that toggles on/off the automatic updates.  

 

I also wonder why your sums aren't updating automatically as each value is incremented.  The alternative might be to refresh the date with an 'OnObjectSave' script trigger tied to whichever field users are updating the data.  (What you are actually summing, is it $sales?)

 

Note that, if your solution is being hosted by FM Server, then global fields are user-session specific. Whichever user is displaying your dashboard on the big TV is the one that is going to need to set the global date field.  I don't think running a script on the server would accomplish this. The alternative is to not make the date field a global field.  Instead make it a non-indexed field in a related table that has only a single record.  It will show up the same way in all of your records if there is a Cartesian join --[X]-- between the two tables.  

[Harry]

Hi Matthew F. Thanks for your reply.

 

It does sound like a hack, yes.

 

Why aren't my sums updating automatically? Not sure... My Dashboard is one record. I've always seen that the record gets the data and that record doesn't update if other information is changed until you exit the record then enter it again. Perhaps i'm wrong and misunderstanding the behaivour.

 

I have three users who are entering products into a table. They are checking a product and then printing a Barcode label, which adds a record. So we know how many products have been checked that day. Each product has a 'time' on it. It is that 'time' that I am summing. So we have a planned amount of 'time' per day and then an actual 'time' that has been booked in to our stock each day. The Dashboard shows that percentage and is a KPI for some staff to chase.

 

The script trigger sounds like a better non-bodge solution.

 

So, when one of the three users prints a barcode, (there is a script that does that) I could put inside that script the 'Get(currentDate)' step and set that Dashboard field? So it would only update when a new record has been created that is relevant to the Dashboard display, which is really the only time it needs to update. That's better than running a script every minute.

 

During dinner time, no records are being created because people are on their break time. So why run a script taking up network resources?