A colleague approached me the other day with a requirement to “Logoff” users when they have not been active in an Xcelsius dashboard for a certain amount of time. I am sure there are many approaches and ways to accommodate this. The one that strike me first was to use an External Interface Connection (EIC) to capture all the user inputs in the dashboard, and use a counter to check how long they have not changed.
This approach is relatively simple to implement and requires little custom coding. It relies on Xcelsius EIC functionality, which is easy to configure and deploy, and works very well.
All I needed to do was concatenate all the user input cells in an Excel function in the Xcelsius model, point an EIC connection to this cell, and then write a quick timer java script function that resets each time the EIC changes. If the counter reaches 10 seconds (meaning the user has not interacted for 10 seconds), it hides the dashboard. Below is a screen shot of the example, you can also download it here
Keep clicking to keep the dashboard alive...
This is what happens when you stop clicking for more then 10 seconds...