I am trying to set up an excel sheet and use it as a dynamic datasource. Eventuall the Excel is supposed to be stored on a network drive. I have already read the article about how to do this. My question: The article only describes how to do this on windows. Is it possible to do this using the Tizne player on Samsung Signage displays?
UPDATE:
Having spent the day looking at different options on how to solve our problem a few other options have come to mind.
Here is what we are trying to achieve:
Our customer is operating multiple production lines. each of these lines is dedicated to a customer. These customers change. We want to use intuiface to display the Identifier (i.e. the number) of the production line and the customer it is currently dedicated to.
This information is stored in a very simple Excel file (two columns - one with the number one with the customer) that sits on a network drive.
Since the whole approach with the with trying to create a link to a file (as describes in the tutorial) hasn’t worked for me I have been thinking about writing my own interface asset to copy the original file into the local folder (on the player) and overwrite whatever version of the file is there.
(this has caused intuiface composer (in play mode) to crash)
Another idea that came to mind was having Excel export an xml (because handling Excel files in c# is just a pain) und then creating an interface asset that will access this xml file and expose the customer name to intuiface. And doing all the filtering of the xml in c# (as opposed to having intuiface filter the Excel).
What would you suggest I do? And what platforms will these approaches work on? We would like to use Intuiface player on a Tizen system Android would be another option. We would only use a windows machine as a last resort.
First things first: if you want to create a C# Interface Asset, you’ll have to use Windows.
If you want to use one of the 6 other platforms we support, you’ll have to create a JavaScript Interface Asset. In this case, you’ll only have access to subfolders of the experience storage, not the full system storage.
Trying to take a step back in front of your scenario: is “Excel on a network drive” a must-have or can alternatives be proposed?
The first that comes to my mind would be an online “CMS/database” such as Airtable. You (your customer) could then easily update the content online and have the experience get the update data through API Explorer. No need to write any code here.
A second alternative could be to use the mechanism explained in this article:
Have a complete list of data in Excel, containing all number/customers possible value
Use a Player tag to filter that list and display the relevant information on each screen.
You / Your customer can then just change the tags from the Share & Deploy console to update the content.
When there is a need to update this full list, a Publish from Composer will be required.
we suggested using Airtable but the customer is set on having everything run in their own network. So no luck there…
As for the solution with the tags I don’t see how that is going to help. The content of the Excel file is going to change. (today Productione line 1 is reserved for Customer A tomorrow it might be used for Customer B so the entry for line 1 is going to change).
That being said we are not set on using Excel but it has to be something user friendly .The person entering the info is probably going to be a shift-manager with no it background (I suggested giving them a raw XML-file to edit but that was rejected immediatly)
But one solution would be to have everything on Airtable but then have everything downloaded automatically with a Plugin which sits in the background of Intuiface. This will simply mirror everything from an Airtable table/base and download it to either a network drive or a local machine its your choice. So to help answer your question Airtable is really user friendly so someone like a “Shift-Manager” can easily update the content without having to worry about restarting the experience.
You can set the time to download the content to what ever you like this helped me with my scenario when the user didn’t want to use excel.
If you want one master excel database you can on a network drive but you will need to setup a robocopy command to copy to the other locations with your devices. Alternatively you could use our plugin on one device to update all of your devices which simply outputs a JSON file with local URIs for your data this can be accessed through the API Explorer also.
If you want to know more you are more than welcome to drop me a PM.
(for now)