update now button

Edit Subject

This is related to your previous post. I believe someone bought the used product at the price that triggered your alert.

The "update now" button already exists but is only available to people with admin access rights. I suppose we can consider opening this up to users, though it would have to be limited in its use. Maybe one forced update per product per day?

> The "update now" button already exists...
> I suppose we can consider opening this up to users...

Actually, on second thought, there's really no need for an explicit button. It should be something that happens automatically when the page is viewed. Via AJAX, if necessary, to avoid delaying the rendering of the page.

By definition, if someone is looking at the page, theres interest in that specific product, and justification to initiating an update.

> ..though it would have to be limited in its use.
> Maybe one forced update per product per day?

Sure, you'd have to apply a caching algorithm. It would be pointless to update on every page load. But I'd expect more frequent than once a day. My guess would be that you'd want to query Amazon if the data is older than an hour. But you know what your bandwidth and Amazon API limits are, so set as required.

Well, considering that all tracked products get updated 3-4 times per day, and all the rest once every day or two, I'm not sure that initiating a lookup is the best way to go. The product is already in our update queue, so it may be best to focus on improving queue processing speed

To be honest, I kind of like the idea of users having the ability to force updates. We just need to figure out if there's a good way to do it. Or if we can simply avoid it by keeping products more up-to-date, that would be preferred.

> I've implemented this idea.

Excellent. Thanks.

> the product is queued for immediate update...

So I'm guessing that means the updated data won't be reflected in the initial page load, but might be on the second load?

That sounds like behavior that will need to be explained to users. And more likely to train users to keep hitting refresh, which you probably don't want.

But it's a good first cut, as the AJAX part can always be rolled out later.

Correct. Right now it informs the user that they have initiated an update and that they should refresh the page in a minute or so.

The thing about an ajax refresh is that it would need to refresh a lot of the page (all charts, price lists), so I worry that a user will be doing something (creating a price watch, changing chart options, etc) that could be interrupted by an automatic refresh. If I can find a way to make it non-intrusive, I am 100% for it.