Confusion about schedule and history

[Frankynov]

Hello everyone !
We briefly talked about it but I am still confused about the rotation schedule, the history tab and the actual content displayed on a device.
I will take my example, I have a Lineup of 5 rotating dashboards, with a cycle of 25 minutes as you can see

Going into the details of it, I already am confused :

Instead of a global 25 minutes cycle, I see that the auto-cycle is 30 minutes. Is it for pages which don't have a set value set for "Dwell" ?
Then there is the background refresh; I'm not sure to get it either and what is the purpose. Almost all my pages are set to update "when pushed", does that parameter override it ?

Finally, when I look at the history, all the pages of the rotation are displayed at the same time, with an offset of 15 minutes, and they are all marked as "pushed" and "deck warm". For me it's not very easy to distinguish what has really been pushed on the device.

I probably need to think harder about it and get the logic behind these, but it's been a few days already and I can't really make my mind 😄

What do you think ?

[dmellok]

You're not missing anything, the UI is wrong in three places here, and your read of the system is actually correct on all counts. Honest admission: I've been so preoccupied with building this that I haven't spent enough time using it, and this is exactly the kind of thing that shows.

The 25 vs 30 minutes. Your guess is right: the 30-minute value is the fallback dwell, used only for pages that don't set their own Dwell. The "cycle 25 min" on the Lineup card is the sum of your per-page dwells (5 pages x 5 min). The problem is that the wizard sets an explicit dwell on every page, so the 30-minute fallback is never used by anything in your Lineup, yet the detail view surfaces it labelled like it's the loop period. Both numbers are technically correct; one of them is describing a setting that does nothing in your setup. I'll either show the computed cycle total there or label the fallback for what it is.

Background refresh vs "when pushed". Right again, and this one I need to fix or at least document properly. The Lineup's background refresh re-renders member pages on its own cadence regardless of the page's update setting, so a page set to "only when pushed" still gets re-rendered every 15 minutes while it's part of a bound Lineup. It doesn't repaint the panel directly, but the refreshed frame is what gets swapped in at the next rotation step, so in practice the Lineup cadence wins. The purpose is to keep the next frame fresh so rotation doesn't show stale data, but "when pushed" should probably act as an opt-out, and the setting needs help text either way.

History. This is the worst of the three, and your instinct that it's hard to tell what really reached the device is understating it. Those rows all marked "pushed" + "deck_warm" are background re-renders that never touched your panel, and the moment the panel actually changes (the rotation step promoting a cached frame) currently writes no History row at all. So History is showing you the invisible work and hiding the visible event. The 15-minute lockstep is also real: all pages get warmed in one pass at startup and stay synchronized forever. I'll fix this so warms are labelled distinctly and rotation steps show up as what the panel actually displayed.

Thanks for pushing on this until it made sense. I'll follow up here as the fixes land.

[dmellok]

The fixes for all three of these just landed on edge (v0.374.0).

History got the biggest change. Background re-renders are now logged as "warmed" with their own "Background refresh" label instead of showing up as "pushed", and they're hidden by default behind a new "Show background" toggle, so the History tab now reads as "what did my panels actually show". The rotation steps themselves, which were previously invisible when they served from the cache, now appear as proper rows with a thumbnail and a "Rotation step" label. The all-at-the-same-timestamp pattern is fixed too: pages sharing a cadence now spread their re-renders across the interval instead of firing together. One caveat: rows recorded before the update keep their old "pushed" label, so the feed only becomes accurate for new activity from here on.

The rotation details view now labels the 30-minute value as "default dwell" (it only applies to pages that don't set their own Dwell, which in your Lineup is none of them) and the hint next to it shows the computed full loop, so you should see your 25 minutes there now.

Background refresh help text now says explicitly that it takes over from each dashboard's own "Updates" setting while the dashboard is in a Lineup. If you want a specific page left alone, the per-page refresh override in the Lineup editor ("never") opts it out of background re-rendering.

If you update and something still reads wrong, I'd like to hear it.

[Frankynov]

Thank you for the explanations and quick fix !
The history is now much more readable and reflects what is actually pushed on device.
One last question about a specific use case.
Let's say I put a dashboard to update hourly. If in the rotation deck I set the background refresh I set it to zero (label goes to Manual only, pages re-render when pushed), does it mean it will be refreshed at the rotation or will it keep the hourly setting ?

[dmellok]

Neither, exactly. The rotation step itself never re-renders a page; it just shows the frame sitting in the Lineup's cache. With background refresh on "Manual only", that cache only gets refilled when you push the Lineup (or when a data change one of the widgets watches triggers a refresh).

Your page's own hourly setting is still active, but it only fires while that page is the one currently on screen. So the sequence you'd actually see: the rotation lands on the page and shows the cached frame, then if it's been more than an hour since it last rendered, it re-renders itself within about half a minute of appearing.

One rough edge I noticed while checking this: that hourly re-render used to update the panel but not the Lineup's cache, so the next time the rotation came back around you'd briefly see the older frame again. That's fixed on edge as of v0.375.2, the refreshed frame now replaces the cached one too.

Short version: "Manual only" controls the off-screen warming, the page's own setting still governs it while it's displayed, and pushing the Lineup is what re-renders everything at once.