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Display Flexible Pricing Points

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Tim Knod
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Hello Guys,

 

im working for one of the most visited amusement parks in germany, and we are using many brightsign players all over the place for example our LED Wall, but for now i need a bit help from you guys what would be the best and easiest way to solve the following problem.

Right now we are running Samsung Signage Screens which are complete useless and are also having diffrent problem which driving us complete crazy...  compared to what we can do with the brightsign player. The problem is were having different price point for example on weekdays and on weekends, the prices gets displayed on the signage screen aswell as some other pictures showing some other information on what type of ticket you can get on that cash register and so on. We want to automate the process of updating the price, which gets displayed on the screen, right now we have to publish manually every morning. Iam right now trying something with rss/xml files which get the data from an mysql database, because we update the price every day via an sql statement, but i though you guys maybe have an better idea to do so on an easier way?

 

Thanks in advance!

 

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    Ken C

    Tim,

    If you don't require remote updating of pricing changes, just flipping between weekend and weekday pricing, the simplest and most robust solution would be to have two presentations and use a recurring schedule to switch between them.

    If you do want a more flexible remote update system, there are several different approaches you could take, depending on your back end.

    Would you prefer to have your Brightsigns poll your server for pricing updates (either at recurring intervals or scheduled)? Or would you prefer to have your servers push updates to your Brightsigns? 

    For polling, if you have an HTTP server available, you could use a roUrlTransfer object called by an roTimer to do an HTTP GET to download your pricing information. The pricing could be written out to a file under your web server's html folder and stored as an XML file or a JSON file or even a CSV or flat text file. BrightScript has objects and methods that will easily parse XML, JSON or CSV/flat text (using a RegEx). Or even better, have a script (Perl, Python, etc.) that just accesses your SQL database and returns XML or JSON when the Brightsigns do the GET request. I've used this method on several projects.

    Another polling method you might consider, if your pricing information is stored as image files on a server, is to generate your own sync spec and leverage the roAssetFetcher, roAssetCollection and roAssetPool objects for doing HTTP requests. The benefit here is they can take care of automatic asset validation / fixity checking using MD5 or SHA. 

    For a push based system, you could use the either the roTCPServer object or the roHTTPServer object. Your server would then connect to the Brightsigns any time the price changes. You could cache the data either in a custom registry section or as a file (XML, JSON, flat) on the Brightsign after every update.

    You could also use any of these techniques to transfer a schedule of future pricing changes (again XML, JSON, etc.) and cache it, so even if the network connection goes down during a pricing change window, your device will still update the pricing at the scheduled time. I always try to build in caching where appropriate.

    Cheers,

    Ken C.

    (EDITED)

     

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