One way of auto refreshing Datazen in your browser

Yesterday I saw Christopher Finlan tweet about one way of making your Datazen dashboard auto refresh. He used a Firefox add-in for this, and I’d like to show you how I have been doing this.

If you want to show Datazen on a big screen there is at this point no out-of-the-box way to auto refresh your dashboard, meaning you have to open it to get new data. If you use the browser viewer you can quite quickly create one of the simplest websites in the world to do this.

In the header of your .html file add the following line:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="90" />

It will make your page refresh every 90 seconds. This can also be used if you want to circle some of your dashboards, sort of like a carousel. The line below will after 30 seconds go to the specified URL instead of just refreshing the page. To complete the circle make sure to go to the first dashboard in your last dashboard.

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="30; URL='NextDashboard'">

So what does the .html file look like for the easiest example? Something like this, just exchange “DashboardURL” with your URL:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Name of Dashboard</title>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="90 ">
</head>
<body style="margin:0px;padding:0px;overflow:hidden">
<iframe src="DashboardURL" frameborder="0" style="overflow:hidden;overflow-x:hidden;overflow-y:hidden;height:100%;width:100%;position:absolute;top:0px;left:0px;right:0px;bottom:0px" height="100%" width="100%"></iframe>
</body>

Note: If you are going to setup an auto refresh I’d suggest you also set up your guest account so you can have access to those dashboards without having to login. You can then use the public dashboard URL in the source of your iframe.

5 thoughts on “One way of auto refreshing Datazen in your browser

  1. Hi there
    Just recently i have this need to put a live datazen dashboard on a big screen.
    Your solution works fine but with a catch. In shorter refresh times like 5 or 10 seconds, the constant screen flicker is not an option.
    Is there any other way to auto-refresh a datazen dashboard? Something that works like auto-refresh in SSRS.
    Thanks

    1. Hi. Unfortunately Dataset does not have any form of built in refresh. That is why we are forced to refresh the entire page periodically to get new data. This might not work in all cases, but it is not often it is critical to have updates every 5 seconds.

      If we are lucky they might do some work on it in sql server 2016 as Datazen is a part if SSRS there, but I have not heard anything specific so this is just wishful thinking from my side.

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