Automatic Dashboard Refresh

This weeks post concerns a piece of functionality that I've been struggling with for ages, and I'm quite pleased with myself to have it working.  It's a feature that is requested time and time again by clients - a dashboard that refreshes itself.

The sticking point for this has always been that a Visualforce component is required to add logic to a dashboard, but as Visualforce pages are contained in an iframe served from a different host to the dashboard page, it isn't possible to navigate to the Refresh button and click it programmatically - the browser blocks this as a cross-site scripting attack.  There is another technique to embed Javascript into a Salesforce page via a sidebar component, but dashboard pages don't have a sidebar so that's out too.

Thus I needed to take an alternative approach to this and started to investigate effecting the refresh server side from Apex code.

The first thing that I decided I needed to get at was the ID of the dashboard itself.  This is encoded in the dashboard URL, an example from my dev org is : https://na6.salesforce.com/01Z80000000lf7nEAA, where 01Z80000000lf7nEAA is the ID.  Once again though, it isn't possible to interrogate the URL of the main window from a Visualforce component due to Cross Site Scripting.  Thinking back to my web development days at Olive Systems Limited, it struck me that the HTTP request headers for the Visualforce component might provide some useful information.  I therefore created a Visualforce page with a controller that traversed the HTTP headers and output the details to the System log:

Map headers=ApexPages.currentPage().getHeaders();
for (String key : headers.keySet())
{
   System.debug('### ' + key + '=' + headers.get(key));
}

I then added this page to my dashboard which gave the following output in the system log:

14:50:34.055 (55491000)|USER_DEBUG|[20]|DEBUG|### Accept=application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
14:50:34.055 (55645000)|USER_DEBUG|[20]|DEBUG|### Accept-Charset=ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3
14:50:34.055 (55790000)|USER_DEBUG|[20]|DEBUG|### Accept-Encoding=gzip,deflate,sdch
14:50:34.055 (55936000)|USER_DEBUG|[20]|DEBUG|### Accept-Language=en-GB,en-US;q=0.8,en;q=0.6
14:50:34.056 (56092000)|USER_DEBUG|[20]|DEBUG|### CipherSuite=RC4-MD5 TLSv1 128-bits
14:50:34.056 (56239000)|USER_DEBUG|[20]|DEBUG|### Connection=keep-alive
14:50:34.056 (56388000)|USER_DEBUG|[20]|DEBUG|### Host=kab-tutorial.na6.visual.force.com
14:50:34.056 (56532000)|USER_DEBUG|[20]|DEBUG|### Referer=https://na6.salesforce.com/01Z80000000lf7nEAA
14:50:34.056 (56677000)|USER_DEBUG|[20]|DEBUG|### User-Agent=Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Jolicloud Linux i686) AppleWebKit/534.24 (KHTML, like Gecko) Joli OS/1.2 Chromium/11.0.696.14 Chrome/11.0.696.14 Safari/534.24
14:50:34.056 (56823000)|USER_DEBUG|[20]|DEBUG|### X-Salesforce-Forwarded-To=na6.salesforce.com
14:50:34.056 (56967000)|USER_DEBUG|[20]|DEBUG|### X-Salesforce-SIP=80.176.152.54

and I have a result - the Referer header shows the full URL of the dashboard that my Visualforce component has been added to.

Referer=https://na6.salesforce.com/01Z80000000lf7nEAA

The next hurdle was how to programmatically trigger a dashboard refresh.  Inspecting the Refresh button didn't help much - it was tied to a bunch of Javascript that wouldn't help me server side.   Using the Fiddler web debugger, I clicked the Refresh button and monitored the requests that were submitted to the Salesforce server with fingers crossed that it would be a GET rather than a POST request.  Once again I had a result and could see that one of the requests was an HTTP GET on:


https://na6.salesforce.com/dash/dashboardRefresh.apexp?id=01Z80000000lf7nEAA.

I copied this URL and submitted it directly via the browser. The first attempt returned a minimal page body that the refresh had been submitted - not quite what I had in mind. Upon requesting the page again, I received another small page, but this time telling me that the dashboard had been refreshed. Opening the dashboard page in another tab showed that the refresh had taken place successfully.

At this point I started to think that this might be possible after all!

Next up I added code to my controller to retrieve the referrer and extract the id.  Upon adding this to my dashboard it threw an error.  Not quite what I had in mind.  The reason for this turned out to be simple - the URL for a dashboard edit page is in a different format to the view.  A similar issue was waiting when the dashboard was embedded in a Home page - in this case the Referer header wasn't present.  Luckily these were straightforward to detect and put out a message that the dashboard wouldn't refresh.

I then created an action method that would carry out the HTTP GET, by creating a PageReference to the  refresh page identified above, adding the id to the parameters and executing the getContent() method.  This code is inside a loop, which will make a maximum of 10 attempts to refresh before giving up.  An actionFunction on the page in association with a Javascript setTimeout() invoked the refresh action method 60 seconds after the page was loaded.   Finally, using a technique outlined in an earlier post from this blog, I was able to automatically reload the dashboard after the refresh.

Refreshing after 60 seconds seemed far too arduous for the Salesforce servers, so I upped the timeout to one hour.  This introduced the next issue - session timeout.  The next version reduced the timeout to 60 seconds, but for the first 59 times the timeout expired, the page simply refreshed.  Only on the 60th did the dashboard actually refresh.  This nicely circumvented the session timeout, as the page was submitted every minute.

Finally, I wanted to give the users a visual indication that the dashboard would automatically refresh, resulting in a recurring timeout that fired every second and counted down the seconds until refresh.

While this is probably starting to sound like quite a lot of code, there isn't actually that much to it.

Controller:

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
//
// Custom controller for dashboard refresh Visualforce page
//
// Author: Keir Bowden
//
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
public with sharing class DashboardRefreshController
{
 public Boolean needsRefresh {get; set;}
 public Boolean canRefresh {get; set;}
 public Id dbIdent {get; set;}
 public Integer minutes {get; set;}
 
 public DashboardRefreshController()
 {
  needsRefresh=true;
  setup();
  minutes=59;
 }
 
 public void setup()
 {
  Map<String, String> headers=ApexPages.currentPage().getHeaders();
  String referrer=headers.get('Referer');
  
  if (null==referrer)
  {
   canRefresh=false;
  }
  else
  {
   Integer lastSlashPos=referrer.lastIndexOf('/');
   lastSlashPos++;
   Integer paramPos=referrer.indexOf('?', lastSlashPos);
  
  
   String result='';
   if (-1!=paramPos)
   {
    result=referrer.substring(lastSlashPos, paramPos);
   }
   else
   {
    result=referrer.substring(lastSlashPos);
   }
   
   try
   {
    dbIdent=result;
    canRefresh=true;
   }
   catch (Exception e)
   {
    canRefresh=false; 
   }
  }
 }
 
 public PageReference refreshDashboard()
 {
  minutes--;
  if (-1==minutes)
  {
   needsRefresh=false;
   String refUrlStr='/dash/dashboardRefresh.apexp?id='+dbIdent;
   Boolean refreshed=false;
   Integer idx=0;
   while ( (!refreshed) && (idx<10) )
   {
    PageReference pr=new PageReference(refUrlStr);
    Blob body=pr.getContent();
    String bodyStr=body.toString();
    refreshed=(-1!=bodyStr.indexOf('Last refreshed'));
    idx++;
   }
  }
   
  return null;
 }
}

Page:

<apex:page sidebar="false" showheader="false" standardstylesheets="false" controller="DashboardRefreshController">

<apex:outputPanel rendered="{!canRefresh}">
 <apex:form >
     <apex:actionFunction name="doRefresh" action="{!refreshDashboard}" />
     <apex:outputPanel id="detail">
   <div id="countDown"></div>
     </apex:outputPanel>
 </apex:form>

 <apex:outputPanel id="scriptPanel">
     <apex:outputPanel rendered="{!needsRefresh}">
   <script>
    window.onload = function() 
    {
     startCountDown(59, 1000, doRefresh);
    } 

    function startCountDown(i, p, f) 
    {
     var pause = p;
     var fn = f;
    
     var countDownObj = document.getElementById("countDown");
     if (countDownObj == null) 
     {
      alert("div not found, check your id");
      return;
     }
    
     countDownObj.count = function(i) 
     {
      countDownObj.innerHTML = 'Refreshing in {!minutes} minutes ' + i + ' seconds';
      if (i == 0) 
      {
       fn();
       return;
      }
      setTimeout(function() 
       {
        countDownObj.count(i - 1);
       },
       pause
      );
     } 
  
     countDownObj.count(i);
    }
   </script>
     </apex:outputPanel>
     
  <apex:outputPanel rendered="{!NOT(needsRefresh)}">
   <script>
       window.top.location='/{!dbIdent}';
   </script>
     </apex:outputPanel>
 </apex:outputPanel>

</apex:outputPanel>
<apex:outputPanel rendered="{!NOT(canRefresh)}">
   Edit mode/home page - refresh disabled
</apex:outputPanel>


</apex:page>

Below is a screenshot of the page embedded in a dashboard:

Once the countdown reaches 0 minutes and zero seconds, the page is automatically refreshed and reloaded to show the updated details.

A couple of words of caution:

• The page that I'm hitting to refresh isn't documented by Salesforce, which most likely means it is unsupported.  Thus a future release could easily break this functionality.
• I haven't tried this on a hugely complex dashboard, so I don't know what would happen if the dashboard took significant time to refresh.
• This is using the browser to trigger the refresh, so if you close the browser session, the refresh won't happen.
• Refreshing dashboards pulls in information from a number of sources, so refreshing with a short time interval will put additional strain on the Salesforce servers.  
• I've only tested this with google chrome, so it may not work with other browsers.