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Retaining HTML5 data throughout presentation?

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Steve Demuth
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The device I'm using is an XD230. My presentation has a media zone that displays a photo slideshow using an ImageList and will occasionally display an HTML5 page for a weather report. My HTML5 weather report is programmed to cache the weather data so that it is only refreshed once every 10 minutes. However, the HTML5 page is completely reloading each time it is displayed on the screen. If it displays every 5 minutes then the weather server is polled every 5 minutes, ignoring the 10 minute refresh period.

Is it possible to retain the HTML5 state between viewings so that it doesn't have to reload from scratch each time?

Or, as an alternative, am I able to set/retrieve global Brightsign variables that could be used to store the weather data between views? (I've tried doing this but haven't been able to get them to work; a working example would be wonderful.)

Thanks for your help!

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8 comments

  • 0
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    Info

    You could put your HTML5 page permanent in the background, and doing a SlideShow overlay on it with a transparent png in it. Every time the transparent png is displayed, your HTML5 page shows up... :-)

  • 0
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    Steve Demuth

    I tried your suggestion but, regardless of what I do, the HTML5 zone always appears over top of the slideshow images... ?

  • 0
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    Brandon

    Yes, currently HTML5 zones appear on top of all other zones.

    One way around this is to use Other > Resize Zone and move (don't resize or it might be redraw properly) the zone off-screen (ie, set its x,y to 1920,1080)

  • 0
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    Steve Demuth

    Adding the Zone Resize command to my presentation causes the XD230 error light to blink and the unit to reset when the command is called.  This seems to occur regardless of where I move the zone, even if I'm moving it to another location on-screen.  Changing the width and height causes the same issue.  I'm using BrightAuthor version 3.8.0.39 and firmware version 4.7.151.

  • 0
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    Roni Starc

    You could store the data into BS user values and then recall it from there. Every couple of recalls the page could reload and restore the data. This way you'll have less requests to the weather API.

  • 0
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    Steve Demuth

    Roni,

    That would be fine with me but I haven't been able to figure out how to store the BS user variables using javascript.  Any suggestions?  Some example code would be great.  Thanks.  

  • 0
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    Roni Starc

    Steve it is described in the Creating a custom device webpage guide (http://brightsignbiz.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/Creating%20a%20Custom%20Device%20Webpage.pdf). You can use the same principle in the displayed html5 zones.

    Althoug I am currently more looking into retrieving and parsing JSON in a brightscript plugin (and storing) as opposed to doing it in the display page. Maybe it would have better performance. But can't help you (yet) with this approach.

  • 0
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    Steve Demuth

    Using the newly released firmware and BrightAuthor resolved the hardware errors when moving the HTML5 zone off-screen.

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