How the workspace stays up to date
Goal: Know what refreshes on its own, and why a tab you left in the background is not costing you anything.
You do not need to refresh the page. When something in your workspace changes, OpenX tells every page you have open, and only the readout that changed reads again.
What happens when something changes
- A Save or an accepted proposal updates your open pages, including a second tab or a teammate's page on the same workspace.
- A deploy announces its start and its finish, whether it succeeds or fails. The window that started it and any other window showing that kind of work pick it up from there, so a run a teammate started shows as running in your window too.
- When a deploy finishes, the next read of your health and inventory answers is fresh, not a copy from before the deploy.
What a readout does on its own
Every badge, health line, count and progress line reads at three moments:
- When it first appears.
- When you come back to its tab.
- When OpenX says the thing it shows has changed.
Between those moments it does nothing.
Open windows follow your runs
A window that shows a deploy or a setup step does not check on a timer while it waits. The Deploy progress, the setup history and health lines, the Licenses health and stats tabs, Private Cloud Foundation, data stores, database containers, the IoT window and identity provisioning all move on when the run they show announces a step, its finish or a failure. A save that waits for its deploy waits the same way.
When a run reads as finished, the window reads it once more about five seconds later, so a deploy that is still settling is not shown as done too early. Nothing more is read until the next notice.
A tab in the background rests
A tab you are not looking at makes no calls for these readouts: no badge, health or status reads. It is not out of date for long: when you come back, each readout reads once.
If your connection drops, the page reconnects by itself and every readout reads once, so nothing announced while you were away is missed.
The few that still check on a slow clock
Some truths live in Azure, and Azure does not tell OpenX when they change: a cluster that stopped itself when idle, for example. While the tab is in front of you, these readouts also read again on a slow clock, and they stop when the tab is hidden:
| Readout | How often, while the tab is shown |
|---|---|
| IoT power badge | About once a minute |
| Canvas deploy wait | About once a minute |
| Cloud badge | About once a minute |
| Status panel | About once a minute |
| Health of data connections | About every 100 seconds |
| DNS badge | About every five minutes |
A readout that fails three reads in a row stops checking until you come back to the tab, so a broken connection is not retried forever.
Waiting on another site
A few steps wait for something that happens outside OpenX: signing in to Azure, approving access in Microsoft, a new directory being created, or a cluster starting or stopping in the IoT window. While you are on that step, the window checks every few seconds whether it is done (a cluster's power, about every 15 seconds). Each of these waits has an end, so it stops rather than checking forever, and it rests while the tab is hidden.
Related
- Workspace status: how the workspace is doing, part by part.
- Save, accept and Deploy: what each step does.
- Live Stream: the events coming in from your data.