Data connections

Overview

Data connections allow you to connect the contents (or some of the contents) of a text file to a text, table or ticker object. The path to the file to load an image, list or barcode object from may also come from a text source. The connected data could be news from an RSS news source, data from a database, text generated by a web page, text from a custom text editor located in the reception of an hotel or indeed any text output from any other application.

Settings

Main article: Data Connection dialog

To reach the settings, in the text object settings, click the Connect data button in the top right. In the Ticker Object, go to the data tab and click Connect data. The same button is found in the data tab in the Table Object.

DISE Tools

The data connectable objects will accept files on disk and text data from HTTP URLs, but to get text from an RSS feed, a database or some other custom source then you will need some a prior conversion to text data. There are specialized DISE tools that take care of the underlying, dynamic, processing.

• DISE Parser

Generic scriptable data parsing software used for SOAP, RSS, databases, serial communication, and other custom solutions needed to make advanced data connections. Examples of sources retrieved using DISE Parser:

• Airport arrivals and departures information
• Weather information via yr.no - the joint online weather service from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation
• Today's meetings from Exchange
• Event information from tellUs.no
• Webcam motion detection information from Zonetrigger
• Queuing management systems information from Q-Matic

• DISE RSS Reader

Downloads RSS feeds (and some other formats) and creates a text-file containing ticker formatted data.

• UpdateDISE

A custom text editor, where you can setup several input fields and several pages that will be written to the text-files that you specify.

Distribution

There are several ways of making the text file available to the players:

• The tool is on a central computer that then allows you to manually check and send out the text file using DISE Bridge.
• The tool could distribute a text file directly to one or more of your destinations where DISE Probe will download the file to the player.
• The tool could distribute the files all the way to a shared directory on the player where DISE Replay will read from it.
• The tool could be located on the player itself and locally fetching and formatting the text file.

This allows for local modifications of the content, when for example fetching the data from a database.

Note: In all the solutions it is important that DISE Replay knows where to look for the text file in question. If the text file is not distributed with DISE Bridge/DISE Probe you must use the File exists locally on player (don't transmit) option in the Data Connection dialog. This makes sure that this file will not be added to the dependencies list of the DISE Movie and therefore will not be sent out to the player. Enabling this option also tells the system to assume that this file already exists (or will exist) somewhere on the player where DISE Replay can locate it.

Troubleshooting

• When you have checked the option File exists locally on player (don't transmit), DISE Replay will look for the file in the specified location on the player. :For example if you have a message text that is data connected to "C:\Data\message.txt", on the player there needs to be a Data folder on the C drive and there must be a file named message.txt in it.

Read more: Locating files

• If you have specified a UNC path (network address) to find the data connected file, the network drive needs to be accessible and the account needs authentication if that is required.

Generally this is solved by mapping a network drive to the wanted folder, specify login details (user and password) to access and have it automatically log in on startup.

Note: Do this on both the manager and player.

For example, you have a message text that is data connected to "\\server\share\message.txt". \\server\share needs authentication. You create a mapped network drive called S: to \\server\share by either using the "Map network drive" in Windows Explorer or open a command line window and type:

Create a mapped drive:

net use S: \\server\share /user:domain\username /persistent:yes password

Now instead, data connect to the file S:\message.txt.