About choosing refresh options for Discoverer portlets

When you create a Discoverer portlet, you specify how often to refresh the data in the portlet. Each time a portlet is refreshed, it requires at least one Discoverer session on the middle tier machine. If different users are using different connections for viewing the same portlet, a different Discoverer session is required for each user.

The number of portlet instances that Oracle Portal will refresh is restricted. The maximum number is determined by the Discoverer manager or Oracle administrator (for more information about the number of sessions in the Discoverer Portlet Provider's pool, see the Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer Configuration Guide). If the number of refresh jobs exceeds the number of sessions at any given time, the refresh jobs are queued until a session becomes available.

It is recommended that you select the lowest frequency possible that will still provide your users with data that meets their timeliness requirements. Values for Last refresh time and next refresh time are displayed in each portlet so that users will know how recent the data is. If you allow users to analyze the data by selecting an Analyze Worksheet link, a new query will be run and they will see the current data in Discoverer Viewer.

You can choose to not refresh the portlet, which is the default setting. In this case, the portlet will require a Discoverer session when it is published, when a new user accesses it for the first time, or when a user changes the set of parameter values (only applies to Worksheet or Gauges portlets based on worksheets with parameters). You will not be able to set the refresh schedule of a Discoverer List of Worksheets portlet that contains a static list of worksheets.

As the publisher of a portlet, you can go to the Edit Defaults page of a portlet at any time and select the Refresh Portlet Now option to manually refresh the portlet.