Does anyone know what the background sync fre...

[MultiTech]

Does anyone know what the background sync frequency is if it’s left to it’s own devices?

Meaning, if I let it just sit there… how long between syncs?

[RezaRaoofi]

I think it is 30 minutes.

[Grant_Stead]

30 minutes, I’m like 90%

[MultiTech]

@RezaRaoofi @Grant_Stead

Thanks guys.

I was thinking it was around there too.

[pravse]

Right on. Though we’re actively working on shrinking that.

[Jonathan_S]

Has this ever been done? Is it still 30 minutes?

[LeventK]

@Jonathan_S
Yes it’s still every 30 mins

[MultiTech]

@praveen

This leads to a request…

Could there be a setting for dashboards where you could make them “live”?

A setting that switches the background sync time to 30 seconds instead?

The idea would be for a dashboard on a TV or display - something you could set and forget.

Another idea would be if the dashboard was live, you could create a mobile version to use on your phone and use your phone like a remote.

[RezaRaoofi]

Ability to adjust background sync would be useful, and I have asked this before too, but I am thinking in a different scenario; imagine you have a large back-end SQL database, and you do need to save changes ASAP, but you wouldn’t want to fetch the data back to the app all the time; that would actually cost you for the excess I/O too, so in such scenario we could increase that sync time to several hours, or even once a day.

[MultiTech]

@RezaRaoofi nice!

[RezaRaoofi]

@MultiTech_Visions just to clarify a little more, AppSheet cannot recognize what table has changed for SQL databases they way it does for spreadsheets, so every background sync will fetch all data in all app’s tables; now imagine you have several large tables in the app and 10 users in the office all leave their browsers on all day just to see that dashboard live on their screen or for other reasons, then AppSheet will retrieve ten times the database size every 30 seconds! I think your apps might end up stuck in syncing all the time!

I understand you can (or definitely have to!) use security filter to reduce the download size, but it is not always easy to come up with a right security filter just to fight the syncing for unchanged volume of data, therefore ability to adjust the sync frequency would be a great feature.

[MultiTech]

@RezaRaoofi

Ideally you would really want the system, if it was turned live, to watch for updates from the spreadsheet API and trigger off of those.

And if you were going to turn something on like that, it’s up to the designer of the system to build that dashboard in a way that it doesn’t use a lot of data. create an analysis of your data that is its own entity, and that does all of the work to give you your analytics, but in reality it’s an extremely smaller data set to display.

I can see the obviously easy potential for abuse with this… Where someone would make a nice dashboard with some chart views (that are really looking at the entire database that somebody has, with tens of thousands of rows or lore) - and they’re just using the AppSheet built charts and diagrams because they look nice on a dashboard.

And if that’s being triggered by every update, and there’s a crap ton of people using the system, then yeah… Things could get really crazy.

[RezaRaoofi]

Yes, you are right; they should thoroughly analyze the data and make dashboard based on a small data set, but if they just attach large SQL tables to the app, regardless of that table having any roles in the dashboard or not, then AppSheet will sync the whole data on every single sync.

Especially since Praveen mentioned that they were actively working to shrink that 30 minutes, my concern is that the timing remains as a fixed universal setting on the server side that you have no control on it, then in that case I would think twice before using AppSheet along with a SQL database. In the spreadsheet world I don’t really care whether it is 30 minutes or 30 seconds, adjustable or not.

[Carolineapp]

Hi! Has this change? Is it still 30 min?

[Steve]

Yes, still 30 minutes.

[graham_howe]

This might be a crazy suggestion, but for the examples where a screen might be stuck showing a single view or dashboard, I assume that means a browser. So why not just embed the app in a simple refreshing html page like this:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head></head>
  <body>
    <iframe src="https://www.appsheet.com/start/...." style="width:100%;height:100vh"></iframe>
    <script>
    setTimeout("location.reload(true);", 30000);
    </script>
  </body>
</html>```