Shared View Cache Update Frequency

[Nicholas_Warren]

I have a shared view that should react to data that has changed in another table in the base, however it seems to take a while before the change is reflected in the shared view. Does anyone know what the frequency of the cache refresh for a shared view is? Is it possible to change it?

Essentially I have a directory of freelancers that can be used by all contributors to network with each other. Part of that networking is finding out who is near you. Each entry in the directory has a long and lat associated with it and I have implemented a function that calculates distances based on who is selected in a linked table (i.e the person selected there is the point from which distance calculations are performed).

I've implemented it this way so that I don't have to get charged for geocoding API calls and because the contributors are not users on my base (they don't have Airtable accounts, they just contribute by filling in their details on a form and viewing the directory by the shared view). There is no budget for this service, I'm doing it to be helpful to the community I'm part of.

Obviously it all works instantly if I select the person in the linked table when logged into the base myself but the shared view takes sometime to update, which can cause frustration for the users. If I can tell them it will take a certain amount of time before it updates that would be useful. If I could shorten that time all the better.

Also open to suggestions of other ways to implement this if people think there is a better way.

[ScottWorld]

Unfortunately, shared views never refresh on their own.

They depend on either the user refreshing the page or for the user’s computer/device to automatically refresh the page.

The only solutions that I know of would be paid solutions:

1. You could embed the shared view in your own website’s page, and write your own JavaScript code to continuously refresh your webpage.

2. You could use a portal tool like Noloco, which refreshes immediately as soon as changes are made in Airtable. I give a brief tutorial of Noloco on this episode of the BuiltOnAir podcast. And I also presented a full one-hour webinar on Noloco called Building a Client Portal on Noloco powered by Airtable.

[Nicholas_Warren]

Thanks for the suggestions.

In my testing it took quite some time before the changed data was reflected in the shared view, even with continuously refreshing the webpage. Hence my thoughts towards some kind of 'cache' being in place. Is this not the case? If so is the cache down to the web browser? (although I did try on multiple machines and with deleting caches/website data but to no avail).

[ScottWorld]

No, if you refresh your web page, the current information in Airtable should immediately display. So there might be some other issue going on like you mentioned… maybe a web browser issue.

[Alexey_Gusev]

At first, I think it depends on your activity. When non-collaborators seek for non-collaborators, without your actions, it may freeze for some time. And maybe it depends on plan type.
"Fast, Good, Cheap: Pick Any Two."

btw, 'find distance by latitude, longitude' needs trigonometric functions, or you need to replace them using math. Is it possible you overloaded the table with equations?