Hi Christopher,

Thanks for the question. You are right that there is not any documentation for the Remote Operation block. This was originally designed as an experimental stop-gap betwen this and a full blown "External process" block, which is discussed here:

http://forums.visokio.com/discussion/1447

We haven't implemented this yet because we haven't seen a big demand from our user base up to now.

The remote operation is designed to allow you to POST data to an external server, the external server will then do some work and return the data back to Omniscope. This means that you could have a process running on a server that would undertake some specialised data-crunching not supported in the Omniscope application. Alternatively it could take your data and forward it on to another web service. The actual work undertaken is completely managed by you, allowing you to write your own data feed or operation.

In the "Upload" tab you define the format of the data that will be sent to the server.

In the "Server" tab you specify the address/port of the server.

In the "Server parameters" tab you define the URL parameters.

In the "Download" tab you specify the format of the data returned from the server.

Please let us know if you have any further questions.

Thanks Chris!

Yeah... what we really would like is the full blown "external process" block. The link you gave to the discussion does not work... is 1447 the right number (or maybe I do not have permission to access that discussion thread)?

Anyhow, I got the Remote Operation block to work (just a simple test case). I wrote a small Java servlet. I get the upload data (CSV format) in the body of the servlet request. I write CSV data to the servlet response and I see the data in the data preview section of the Remote Operation block. Cool.

It seems to send a request to the server about every 5 seconds. I was expecting it to send a request only when the input changed. Is there a way to achieve that?

Thanks,
Chris

Hi Chris,

You need to be an Alpha partner to see that discussion. Please contact support@visokio.com if you would like to be an alpha partner.

If you click on block tools (spanner icon in top-right of block) > update options by default the block should only update when explicitly refreshing from source. You should also turn off automatic data refresh (Data > Automatic refresh).

OK. Thanks Chris!