How to use shared folders (like dropbox) as a data feed source

Hi all.

We just published a support page about how to use shared folders with collections.
In this article you will learn how to use shared folders - including synchronized folder solutions like Dropbox - as a data feed source for Intuiface collections. With this trick, you can update content displayed in your running Intuiface experiences simply by changing the source files found in the shared folder.
Here’s the page

Enjoy!

Bomee

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New Addendum to the article for Excel :slight_smile:

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Very nice :star_struck:

Hi Alex,

Nice work on this one. One question I have. We often version our updates of experiences so we can roll back any changes. Example we make a an experience called “Experience Name - Current Date”. We do an update the next day we call it “Experience Name - Today’s Date” etc and publish via the management console.

Obviously when it comes to this solution we will lose the sym links each time as the experience folder name is different.

I’m trying to figure out a way for the experience to run a batch script on first launch to create the sym link each time - but for that we would need the path to the experience which (when published using the intuiface console) is some random number.

Any ideas how we might extract that number via some kind of wildcard entry?

Hi Benton,

The “number” is actually the Experience ID :slight_smile:

You may want to dig on our Share and Deploy API, and with a bit of scripting, maybe it’s possible to extract the Experience ID by filtering on the Experience Name or so.

We also have a dedicated Sample on the Marketplace, with a related Article, but that’s more for a usage inside Intuiface.

Regards,

Alex.

Hey there. Following up on this discussion. We have the same issue, when we make a change to an experience that uses network collections, rename the experience and publish it, the network links are broken. Could Intuiface make an option where the links could remain? Also, is it possible when using network collection sources that you can write to those sources as well, in addition to just reading from them? - Thank you! Dave

Hi David @DLazar ,

When you rename an Experience, as you do a “Save As”, it’s creating a new Experience, with a new Experience ID.

Consequence is, on Player where you deploy it, it will be stored in a different folder that the original one. The path to an Experience on a Player is:
"%PUBLIC%\IntuiFace\[ExperienceID]\"

As you can see, Experience ID is used in the storage path. It means you will need to set the MKLINK every time the Experience Name/ID changes, as explained in details in this Help Center article.

If, from the device running the Player, you can write to the network folder (from your Windows Explorer for instance) then you should be able to do the same from the Experience running in the Player.

It’s more a Windows system admin configuration than an Intuiface requirement, as we can’t override these.

I recommend you to test “out of Intuiface”, you must be able to change a collection from the Player device by adding/removing/updating content on your network folder in order to have it work in your Player.

Kind regards,

Alex.

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