SilverLight RIA Monitor Tool, need help with design

Question

Ok here's (a simplification of) the situation, the server side has a list of connectionstrings for different DBs on different machines (values in relevant tables keep changing by other SW).

Uppon request from the client side, the server side checks the DBs one by one and has a logic that outputs a status string.

The client side should display a datagrid with the machine name and status string for all machines. The idea is that the monitor continually refresh to show any changes in status for any of the machines.

I've implemented a first draft with RIA services which works fine, I've used a DispatcherTimer to keep refreshing the ui.

My question is ,in this scenario, is it possible to get automatic update of the UI whenever any of the underlying DB's change using RIA bindings instead of actively initiating the queries from the client with DispatcherTimer ??

Any clues will be really appreciated ! Thanks Micha

Answer 1

RIA is just a layer on top of WCF service calls. You still need to poll for data changes.

You can reduce the amount of data moved across by having a "lastchanged" value cached on the server side. You poll the lastChanged value first on a regular basis and then only decide to pull the data if that value has changed.

That does of course mean some extra work server-side to update that value when changes occur, but if it all changes come in via RIA services it is pretty easy to hook in.