A typical dashboard or report has several widgets that require query execution in order to present up-to-date results. Some widgets may need to be updated frequently, some on a daily basis, or on a weekly basis - and so on.
After you are done creating a dashboard, you can easily refresh it (by clicking F5 or clicking the Refresh button). If you're information hungry like me, you find yourself doing that quite often.
If your dashboard is created over an Excel or CSV file, this is not really a problem. But if it's over a database server, these refreshes can take a while - depending on the size of the tables and network traffic.
At some point I found myself staring at a dashboard with 56 widgets on it, each of them executing a different query against 3 different database servers down in our basement. Taking into consideration that I am not the only one craving non-stop information in the organization and the fact that I didn't want to wait 10 minutes for my dashboard to refresh - I turned to re-organize my dashboard a little bit.
I realized that most of the widgets in my dashboards could be refreshed just once a day. There were about two groups of 5 widgets each I need to refresh at more frequent intervals. So, I turned to the Widgets tab on the left of the screen, scrolled down until I reached the Actions section and dropped 3 "Refresh Widgets" action buttons onto the sheet.
A "Refresh Widgets" action is exactly what it sounds like. It refreshes widgets. Right clicking on it lets you configure which widgets will be refreshed once the button is pressed.
By adding three separate action buttons and configuring the widgets they refresh, I was able to control the amount of queries my dashboard generated every time I needed to see updated results.
Elad
SiSense