What is the best method to refresh display content (possibly push refresh)?

Report · Apr 23, 2012

We are using Coldfusion 9.0, and our issue is simple. We were asked to make a few display screens to put up a schedule of events. So we created a quick backend HTML publisher and made the client refresh every 30 seconds using meta refresh that displays the screen that is published. Works wonderful. A change is made, the screens update quickly in 30 seconds or less.

Over the weekend we had an update push out to the server that openend up a larger issue. The update shut down the webserver temporarily and that caused the display to go to the standard site cannot be reached (diagnose connection, etc). At that point the refresh is killed, the display screens are dead in the water until someone hits f-5. That made us think that everytime we have anykind of blip, the screens will have to be touched. This is a small project, we wanted something simple and we got it. I'm concerned now we just created a techsupport monitoring situation unintentionally.

So that brings me to the real question. What is the best practice to do this? After doing a google search there seems to be all kinds of directions to go in. I don't want a complex solution because the decision to not outsource was based on how quick of a project this was. I am hoping to get some guidance on how to make a simple push of HTML to a screen in a Coldfusion environment.

Thanks in advance for any help offered.

Report · Apr 25, 2012

A simple solution is to include meta tags to instruct the client browser not to cache the page.

<HTML>

<HEAD>

</HEAD>

<BODY>

</BODY>

</HTML>

Report · Apr 25, 2012

Regarding: "A simple solution is to include meta tags to instruct the client browser not to cache the page"

How will that solve the problem?

Report · Apr 25, 2012

Dan Bracuk wrote:
Regarding: "A simple solution is to include meta tags to instruct the client browser not to cache the page"
How will that solve the problem?

Dollfan Alex said, "the display screens are dead in the water until someone hits f-5". I took that to imply the pages are cached.

Report · Apr 25, 2012

If that was implied, I did not mean for that to be. The sentence before explains that you are at the diagnose internet connection screen. At that point, refresh no longer occurs, the content is not even on the screen to be cached. Thanks for taking the time to respond.

Report · Apr 25, 2012

Dolfan Alex wrote:
If that was implied, I did not mean for that to be. The sentence before explains that you are at the diagnose internet connection screen. At that point, refresh no longer occurs, the content is not even on the screen to be cached. Thanks for taking the time to respond.

Ah, I see. Sounds to me like something for websockets. ColdFusion 10 implements websockets. Earlier versions of ColdFusion may use Nathan Mische's websocket gateway.

Report · Apr 25, 2012

Thank you for your replies. I think we are going to depend on the network being stable and organize updates to the server during times we can monitor the screens. After researching the issue we found it to be a little more deeper than at first glance. We found this which is a good lead if we need to go another direction, or someone else has a similar issue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(programming)

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What is the best method to refresh display content (possibly push refresh)?

1 Correct answer