Auto-Refresh/Auto-Save

I am pretty sure most of us here are sports buff. Me being an ardent cricket lover used to spend 4-5 hours on cricinfo. Life is really cool when the scoreboard says the latest score automatically in every 2 minutes. It would have been real killing if someone had to manually click on refresh button to get the latest updates or for money matters latest update on stocks every n minute.

One of my friend recently experienced same problem while dealing with service requests. The scenario was to have auto refresh of the SR list applet pool in every 2 minutes so that users can pick request to work on, as requests were coming from some other portal. Once again support web was our alley. A little bit of browser script and deal was done. Following steps were taken to achieve this:

1 - Query applet for which auto-refresh is required. Open Browser Script editor. Jump on the Applet_Load event and put below script:

function Applet_Load ()

{

//To Invoke AutoRefresh function in every 2 minutes

setTimeout("AutoRefresh()", 120000);

}

2 - Create a function "AutoRefresh()" in the general section of applet with following code:

function AutoRefresh()

{

var sApplet = theApplication().FindApplet("Service Request List Applet");

sApplet.InvokeMethod("ExecuteQuery"); // this is used to refresh current applet

// condition that ensures that it happens in the desired view only, if applet is being used in other views

if(theApplication().GetProfileAttr("ActiveViewName") == "Personal Service Request List View")

{

setTimeout("AutoRefresh()", 120000); // this is to invoke the above function recursively

}

}

Similarly Auto-Save functionality could be achieved by using following function:

function AutoSave()

{

var sApplet = theApplication().FindApplet("Service Request List Applet");

sApplet.InvokeMethod("WriteRecord"); // this is used to write Record

setTimeout("AutoSave()", 120000); // this is to invoke the above function recursively

}

The main crux here is standard javascript function which takes two input parameters.

setTimeout(String(Function name), Number(Delay))

Function name - Name of the function to be executed

Delay - Number representing delay in milliseconds before the specified function will be called.

The same could be achieved by having a button on the List applet but then why to go for beans when you can have Cake.