Monday, November 8, 2004

HTML/Javascript tip: Refreshing an image not the full page

I was discussing with a friend about the creation of a monitoring dashboard in HTML. As any monitoring tool you want to be able to see the information in *real-time*, so you need to refresh the content.... One way of doing it is to refresh the whole page and this is easy, just use the meta tag: <META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="5; URL=http://www.grallandco.com/"> where 5 is the number of seconds between each refresh. Javascript allows you to easily refresh a specific image of your page (a chart for example):

  <img src="myChartServlet" name="chart1"/>    <script language="JavaScript">    function loadImage() {      var now = new Date();      if (document.images) {       document.images.chart1.src = 'myChartServlet?time='+now.getTime(); // add the time to avoid caching      }      setTimeout('loadImage()',1000);    }   setTimeout('loadImage()',1000); </script>
You can obviously make the whole think dynamic and configurable...

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