Remote-reload widget for Dashing

README.md

So, you made a change to your dashboard, and now you have to run all over the building, plugging in a keyboard, and reloading the dashboard on the various TVs in your office. What if you could reload all the dashboard from the comfort of your desk?

Add this widget to the very bottom of your dashboard, after the "gridster" div:

<div class="gridster">
  <ul>
    <li data-row="1" data-col="1" data-sizex="1" data-sizey="1">
      <div data-view="Image" data-image="/benbria/loop.png" style="background-color:#666766"></div>
    </li>

    <!-- Blah blah blah - widgets go here -->

  </ul>
</div>

<!-- Special reload widget, doesn't display on the page. -->
<div data-id="reload" data-view="RemoteReload" style="padding: 0px"></div>

Note the style="padding: 0px"; this is important to make the widget take up no space on the page. Now you can use curl to remotely force all dashboards to reload their page:

curl -d '{ "auth_token": "YOUR_AUTH_TOKEN" }' \http://mydashboard.server.com/widgets/reload

You can also install this across all your dashboards by modifying layout.erb:

<div id="container">
  <%= yield %>
  <div data-id="reload" data-view="RemoteReload" style="padding: 0px"></div>
</div>

remote_reload.coffee

class Dashing.RemoteReload extends Dashing.Widget

  # Wait a short while between reloads.  Sometimes dashing will send a `onData()` event
  # right when we startup, so without this we can get into a reload-forever loop.
  minTimesBetweenReload: 1000 * 5 # 5 seconds

  ready: ->
    @lastLoad = Date.now()
    @initialized = true


  # Handle new data from Dashing.
  onData: (data) ->
    if !@initialized or (Date.now() < (@lastLoad + @minTimesBetweenReload))
        console.log "Too soon to reload.  Wait #{(@lastLoad + @minTimesBetweenReload - Date.now()) / 1000} seconds."
    else if data.url
        location.replace(data.url)
    else
        location.reload()

remote_reload.erb

<!-- This file intentionally left blank -->

Ugh. This "command" thing is a bit of a hack. Without it, though, I've run into cases where we see the dashboard reload continuously.

I wonder if we could store a timestamp when "ready()" gets called, and then not do the reload unless onData() is called more than 30 (?) seconds afterwards? This way an onData() from Dashing right at load time would be ignored (you probably don't want to reload the dashboard if it was just reloaded anyways.) I suspect this would mostly work, but likely would force a dashboard reload if the dashing server ever goes down and comes back up (although that's maybe not a bad thing...) Thoughts?

After adding it, it's add the following text:
"
["str", [Tilt::StringTemplate]]["erb", [Tilt::ErubisTemplate, Tilt::ERBTemplate]]["rhtml", [Tilt::ErubisTemplate, Tilt::ERBTemplate]]["erubis", [Tilt::ErubisTemplate]]["etn", [Tilt::EtanniTemplate]]["etanni", [Tilt::EtanniTemplate]]["haml", [Tilt::HamlTemplate]]["mab", [Tilt::MarkabyTemplate]]["liquid", [Tilt::LiquidTemplate]]["radius", [Tilt::RadiusTemplate]]["markdown", [Tilt::RedcarpetTemplate, Tilt::RedcarpetTemplate::Redcarpet2, Tilt::RedcarpetTemplate::Redcarpet1, Tilt::RDiscountTemplate, Tilt::BlueClothTemplate, Tilt::KramdownTemplate, Tilt::MarukuTemplate]]["mkd", [Tilt::RedcarpetTemplate, Tilt::RedcarpetTemplate::Redcarpet2, Tilt::RedcarpetTemplate::Redcarpet1, Tilt::RDiscountTemplate, Tilt::BlueClothTemplate, Tilt::KramdownTemplate, Tilt::MarukuTemplate]]["md", [Tilt::RedcarpetTemplate, Tilt::RedcarpetTemplate::Redcarpet2, Tilt::RedcarpetTemplate::Redcarpet1, Tilt::RDiscountTemplate, Tilt::BlueClothTemplate, Tilt::KramdownTemplate, Tilt::MarukuTemplate]]["textile", [Tilt::RedClothTemplate]]["rdoc", [Tilt::RDocTemplate]]["wiki", [Tilt::WikiClothTemplate, Tilt::CreoleTemplate]]["creole", [Tilt::CreoleTemplate]]["mediawiki", [Tilt::WikiClothTemplate]]["mw", [Tilt::WikiClothTemplate]]["ad", [Tilt::AsciidoctorTemplate]]["adoc", [Tilt::AsciidoctorTemplate]]["asciidoc", [Tilt::AsciidoctorTemplate]]["html", [Tilt::PlainTemplate]]
"

The reload is working but any idea how to remove the text?
Thanks!

@orenkatz I had the same exact problem. I modified the style on that widget to make it display:none and that solved the issue for me.

You don't need a custom widget for this:

curl -i -d '{"auth_token": "MY_AUTH_TOKEN", "event": "reload"}' http://dashing:3030/dashboards/mydashboard

or, in job format:

require 'uri'
require 'net/http'

uri = URI.parse('http://dashing:3030')
http = Net::HTTP.new(uri.host, uri.port)

SCHEDULER.every '30s' do
    data = '{"auth_token": "AUTH_TOKEN", "event": "reload"}'
    http.post('/dashboards/mydashboard', data)
end

A better way that can be run from within a job:

send_event('refresh_sample', {event: 'reload', dashboard: 'sample'}, 'dashboards')

You can replace refresh_sample with anything you want, but you must replace dashboard: 'sample' with the name of the dashboard you wish to reload.

Here is a tip that will make this widget much simpler. Create a new file in the widget's directory like:

.widget-remote-reload {
  display: none !important;
  padding: 0px;
}

Now, remove the style attribute from the div tag when calling the widget. Simple and effective.

How do i get this to work? I get the following when trying to use CURL from Windows...

c:\cURL\bin>curl -d '{ "auth_token": "MyTokenHere" }' \http://MyIPHere:3030/widgets/reload
curl: (6) Could not resolve host: auth_token
curl: (6) Could not resolve host: MyTokenHere
curl: (3) [globbing] unmatched close brace/bracket in column 1
curl: (1) Protocol "\http" not supported or disabled in libcurl