Dashboards and reports are great tools for visualizing and analyzing the state of your organization or space, but they are not so useful if the data gets stale or a metric loses its meaning. That's why it is so important that the data gets refreshed on an ongoing basis.
Modeler will go to the data source and re-import it, and republish any prepared sources, on a schedule that you set up.
Modeler refreshes and updates all of the raw sources in the entire space. If there are prepared sources, Modeler will also publish them after their raw source is extracted. Recall that the publish functionality takes the raw data and applies any transformations that you defined in the Prepare page, and updates the prepared source, so you definitely need both of those processes to run.
The refresh feature is on the Modeler Prepare page, above the list of sources.
The Run now option immediately imports and publishes, which is very useful when you are building and refining your space, or when you know about a change and want to update right away. By the way, the Connect page also has an option to refresh.
When you have gotten to the point in your space development where you want to refresh the data on a regular basis, here are some things to think about:
- What is the optimum time relative to the data refreshes in the actual connection? You'd want to update Birst after any regular updates in Salesforce, for example, or after a day's work in Jira.
- When are people most likely to view the reports and dashboards? You may want to do a refresh prior to the start of the business day.
- Do you want to get an email saying that the refresh happened?
To create a schedule from Prepare - Schedule - Create, first toggle it on. (This is so you can disable it later, if you want to temporarily pause the schedule.)
Then schedule the frequency and time of the update, such as every Monday at 8AM PST. By default Modeler will send an email to the owner of the space, so if you don't want to be notified you can toggle it off.
Click Save.
Incremental Refresh for Prepared Sources
You can set up prepared sources for incremental refresh. Raw sources are always setup for full refresh while prepared sources can be set to full refresh (default) or incremental refresh. You can now set up prepared sources (based on one or more columns) for incremental refreshes. You have the option to (Keep Original) or (Replace Original) for any matching values in existing rows in the prepared source.
Then select the Incremental tab and select your criteria.
