Refresh Individual Elements Instead of entire page when using API

Good day all from sunny South Africa. New to the forum but have been using bubble for about 2 years now. Firstly I think Bubble is an extremely innovative and intuitive platform and has already helped us develop some management portals etc.

The current problem I have ( and I know this has been covered extensively but with no real solid solution) Is using API’s when real time updates are required. Essentially I am prototyping a subsystem to our main tracking system (We are a telematics business) I have text fields which are dynamically set to pull through the telematics parameters such as speed, GPS position, alarm status etc.

I have had success pulling through these parameters as well as have the vehicles dynamically update on a map using the APIS longs and lats. I currently have a workflow to refresh the page every 60seconds. Obviously this is not a long term option as I have users who will be working on the platform and refreshing the page every 60 seconds is just too disruptive.

I have tried to add the details to a single row/column repeating group as I know repeating groups update in real time however after this did not work I searched the forums and realized API calls do not work in repeating groups.

Is there anyway to refresh a single text element so these parameters update at predefined intervals? or a group for that matter or any work around to this problem ? I have tried everything with no luck.

Apologies If I have not provided enough details.

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Why not make a new api call every 60 seconds which will give you the updated data in your repeating group?

How would I go about this? As it seems that once you set the data source to the API, the repeating group displays no data (Blank) reading on the forums it seems that the functionality to using API calls in repeating group is not there yet.

  1. You setup the api call using the api connector plugin

  2. You set the Repeating Group to > Get external data from api and then select the api call which you setup in api connector.

  3. You create a workflow the runs every 60 seconds and in the workflow you add a step to “Display a list” and you select the Repeating Group and once again set the Data Source to Get external data from api.

This will fetch new data from your api and display it in your repeating group every 60 seconds.

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Thanks for this I will give it a go and post feedback here shortly. Thanks again.

So I managed to get the data displaying in the RG however even with the workflow the parameters do not auto update and still need to refresh the page. Really stumped on this one.

PM me your email and I will help you walk thru it via a quick zoom call.

Sent I could also share the editor with you here?

Yea, send the link and I will take a quick look.

Thanks

There are two pages “Index” and test"

The index page was when i did an example without repeating group…this works when refreshing the page every x seconds.

The test page has the RG with one dynamic text element showing current vehicles speed.

image

Sorry have made app public.

The issue you were experiencing was the same in this old post below, when using api call as a data source insted of a action, you need to have some data variable which changes in order for bubble to make the api call again. You didn’t have any dynamic data variable which was changing which caused the api call to run only once. This can by fixed by adding a a non used header to the api call as mentioned in the post below.

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Thanks again for the assistance and solution.

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