Smart refresh feature

Owned by Emmanuelle BENFERHAT
Last updated: Nov 25, 2020
4 min read

With Data integration

Nov 17, 2020

VUMG-26/VCLD-56 - November 2020 - VUSION Cloud

Retail is facing fierce competition and the increasing needs for operational agility in order to deliver a competitive advantage. Thus, you will certainly need to update your labels according to your commercial and marketing strategy.

To support you in this challenge, SES-imagotag has developed the “Smart Refresh” feature.

 

Concept

A Smart Refresh is used to re-generate and send an image to the label only if this new image is different from the one currently displayed by the label. This way, you can update only targeted labels, without impacting all you store.

This feature can be triggered immediately on an item(s) and/or a label(s) through an API call, set as a punctual task in VUSION Manager or can be scheduled on specific items via API.

Use Case

Here are some use case for this feature:

  • Deploy a new setting in the store that impacts only one type of labels.

  • Schedule a promotion on specific items.

  • Check your labels status for support issues.

Benefits

  • Increase update speed by sending images only to targeted labels and not to all the labels in the store.

  • Optimize your label battery lifetime by sending image update only if there is a modification.

  • Lower your bandwidth usage as there is less data transfer from the cloud to the access points.

What is the different between a refresh and a smart refresh ?

With a refresh, the image will always be regenerated and resent to the label even if there is no modifications in the display. A Smart Refresh will regenerate the image and resend it to the label only if there is changes between the current image displayed and the new image.

Description of the Smart Refresh possibilities

Trigger a Smart refresh immediately through API

How to ?

In order to update targeted labels/items, you can launch a Smart Refresh with an API call one or a batch of items and/or labels. From the API portal , choose VUSION Link Pro product and trigger

and enter your items code and/or labels ID.

This Smart Refresh will be immediate and cannot be scheduled.

Use case example

For support issue, by triggering this Smart Refresh, you can rapidly check if the labels receives correcly the image or not.

This feature needs a subscription to VUSION Link Pro APIs.

Set a Smart refresh task

You can also trigger a Smart Refresh on all your labels in the store at once. This task can be scheduled from VUSION Manager interface. This feature cannot be set for items.

How to launch a Smart Refresh Task from VUSION Manager ?

  1. Go on you Store Dashboard and click on the “Task” tab. To add a task, Click on the blue button “Add”

  2. Enter a task description and choose “Smart Refresh” in the drop-down list.

  3. Select the labels type to be refreshed (at least one type should be chosen).

  4. Select your date, time and time zone. Then click on “Save Task”.

Use case example

You can deploy a new setting on your store and send the new images generated only to labels that are impacted by this setting update.

Schedule Smart refresh on items

How to ?

The last possibility to use a Smart Refresh (latest feature available VCLD-56) is to schedule a Smart Refresh on specific items. This will lead to an image re-generation on all the seleted items. Then, a tranmission will be triggered on the labels matched with these items, if the image is different from the current one displayed.

This feature can be triggered through an API call from the POST item API thanks to a new custom field.

The custom field to apply is "refreshSchedules": ["2020-11-04T10:00:00.218Z"]

Note that the scheduling is in UTC time.

JSON example:

[ { "id":"item1", "price":20, "refreshSchedules":[ "2020-11-04T10:00:00.218Z" ] } ]

The Smart Refresh will be triggered on the define date for item1, on all labels matched to it, on the 4th of November 2020 at 10:00 AM UTC.

Use case example

If you plan a promotion for 7 days, you will need to set the first date of promotion into promotion.start and the last date of your promotion into the field promotion.end. In Studio \ display, create conditions to enable the display only when today() is in between those dates. Then make sure you have put the dates into refreshSchedules to trigger smart refresh.

The label will be refreshed on the first date of promotion and in the last date of promotion.