Using Automatic (Live) Refresh- version 2.3 or better

Automatic refresh is a new Professional/Enterprise edition feature available from version 2.3 that automates the process of refreshing data whenever it changes from within an open Omniscope file. To activate Automatic Refresh, go to the Main Toolbar Tools menu and click on Automatic refresh.  A notice will tell you that a new Auto refresh drop-down menu and a red Hold button have been added to the right-hand side of the Main Toolbar:

The menu will display the timing of the last update. If a fresher version of the data has been retrieved from source and is available, but not yet delivered, the Display latest update option will be available. Pressing the red Hold button pauses refreshing, which may be useful if you are selecting records in preparation for adding them the the Basket or executing power queries using Move and Keep.

If any failures to refresh fully are detected, they are recorded in a log file you can access. Otherwise you will see a greyed-out notice No failures.

Unticking Polling enabled will stop the automatic refresh process. Unticking Show live refresh button will hide the button until the next time you select Tools > Automatic refresh on the Main Toolbar. You can also choose whether or not to play a sound on refresh and report errors on this User's installation.

There are two options for implementing automatic refresh depending on the source of the data. The default is for the User File to refresh from the Source .IOK file from which it was created. This is the Refresh by reloading IOK file option.  The other option, Refresh from linked data source is used when the source data file is not an .IOK Source file, but is instead a data file such as a spreadsheet, an exported copy of a database view/table, or a direct connection to a database via ODBC or JDBC.

If the linked data source is a file, Omniscope will automatically check the source file time stamp at the intervals specified in the Timings section. If the time stamp has changed between polling intervals, Omniscope imports the latest version of the data and displays it.

If the linked data source is a direct ODBC or JDBC connection to a database view, Omniscope will pull a copy of the data from the database view(s)/table(s) at every interval specified, but will not display it if there has been no change in the data.  More sophisticated, higher-performance and less resource-intensive update and refresh options can be developed for direct connections to databases using bespoke Connectors. For more information on developing bespoke Connectors, contact us.

Timings options controlling polling behavior are useful when many User machines are being auto-refreshed. They are configured from this dialog:

These settings enable automatic refresh solutions to be tuned to the update cycle of the data, and to avoid large numbers of User Omniscopes hitting the same resources at exactly the same time.

For more background on this and other data refresh options, see the Knowledge Base sections on Integration and configuring Auto-Refresh solutions on both the client and server side.

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