Improve navigation time between dashboards

#1

Admin Edit: Originally in response to the following topic How To: Fast Switch Between Dashboards with Fully Kiosk Browser but moved to it’s own topic.

I realize this is a bit of an old thread, but wanting to increase the speed of dashboard changes. I think I have the format right, but am I supposed to be putting it in the “Web Content Settings / Start URL”, or somewhere else in Fully? (I can’t find a box titled “Load URL”, so thinking the screen shot above might be an earlier version of Fully, or maybe I am just looking in the wrong spot?

Thanks for the help!

How To: Fast Switch Between Dashboards with Fully Kiosk Browser
#2

The switching can be done via a http link tile (or whatever it’s called) or using a rules engine using the fkb driver.

#3

@Randy_Rands, can you describe the context of the dashboard switching you are working on, and the format you have got so far? Do you want to fast-switch to a dashboard when an event happens, or just navigate from one dashboard to another dashboard by tapping a tile manually?

The loadURL field from @josh’s post is the command supported by the Fully Kiosk Browser’s device handler. See below for your reference.

1 Like
#4

Hi, James - not event-driven at this point - I have a set of tiles on the left side that (should) remain more or less constant for ease of navigation, but each of the tiles opens a different dashboard:

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In the above one, Home is selected (it’s the default for this tablet), at that works fine, but when I click on “lights”, it can take 5-7+ seconds to switch to it on my Fire HD8. It’s <1s on my PC, so I am pretty sure it’s just horsepower, but thought maybe the javascript bit might help pre-load things or something. When I switch back from Lights to Home, it still takes around 5+ seconds, but I have a lot of tiles on the lights screen. I have not populated the other dashboards yet, and when I switch from Home to one of them, it’s pretty quick (around a second). I am not a developer by any means, but if there is some way I should be approaching this differently, happy to give that a try, too! :slight_smile:

Here is my Lights dash, for reference - these are all in-process, so missing some (or maybe a lot of) panache.

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Side question: does the concept exist of a template that might have the “tabs” on the left like I have here, that can be customized with names, but that will then take whatever I put in the “home” screen left-hand nav (i.e. Home, Lights, Rooms, Basement, Security… in my example here) and populate that left-hand nav across the other dashboards? I know I can copy from one to the other, but curious to know if there was something pre-built that way, too. (I will do a search, but have not yet :wink:

Thank you for all the help - very much appreciated!

#5

@Randy_Rands Thanks for the additional details. The number of tiles can certainly be one of the reasons why it takes longer to load. The dashboard is loaded faster on your PC because it has more horse power and the newer browser version is likely to process the javascript more efficiently.

One thing I would suggest here is to check the space tiles in your dashboards. Use “bigger” space tiles wherever possible instead of many 1x1 space tiles. This would greatly reduce the number of the tiles and boost the performance.

(The main goal from the original post is to avoid the full page reload, which is not the case here. When you tap the dashboard tile like those nav tiles from your left side, it doesn’t reload the full page, but just update the client data needed for the dashboard.)

We have internally talked about the dashboard template ideas but it’s not currently available now. Like you already discovered, creating a “baseline” dashboard with the nav tiles, and create new dashboards by copying the baseline dashboard is the suggestion I have now, but I’d encourage you to post a feature request, so others can vote too. :wink:

#6

got it - thank you - consolidating the spacer tiles made a bit of a difference (so more in the 5s range now -vs- usually 6-7), so thanks! :slight_smile:

Is there anything else I can do in order to boost performance (other than a different device or fewer tiles on the screen, I know) - like any caching or moving things to the local file system? Since I know about it, the 5s is just an annoyance, but the WAF will be low here, as it looks like nothing is happening until the new page renders, and she might have very stabby fingers… :wink: The background does not seem to make a big difference in speed, but how about the tile format - does that affect anything?

Just for reference, here are the consolidated spacers:

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Thank you again - I appreciate the responses!

Actually, one thought… can the Nav tiles on the left jump to a specific section of a page? If I made just one huge page, the initial load time would be high, but I could treat each section basically like what each page is now. Not ideal, but just trying to think outside the box a bit.

Thanks! :slight_smile:

#7

You nailed it that these are really the main culprits. Lower powered devices - especially older ones where the browser isn’t as efficient - take longer to render things. So the more tiles that are on the dashboard you are navigating from and the dashboard you are navigating to will slow down the process.

That’s why one of the common recommendations is to consolidate the Spacer tiles as it minimizes the amount of rendering the tablet has to do.

Out of curiosity, what generation Fire HD 8 tablet is it?

#8

They are 8th gen. Does that make a difference?

#9

It can. The 8th generation is relatively new though. :thinking:

#10

@Randy_Rands, wanted to circle back on this and make sure you are aware of the dashboard performance enhancement we released recently. Don’t forget to refresh your dashboard page to load the new release and let us know how things work for you. :wink: