Custom plugin doesn't autoRefresh when added to a dashboard

[dmprieto]

Hi
I developed a custom plugin for Kibana 7.17.0 and when I enable the autoRefresh in the Visualization editor page it works ok, but when I add the custom plugin to an empty dashboard it doesn't refresh when autoRefresh is enabled in the dashboard

Also, I noticed that if besides the custom plugin I add a default Kibana plugin like "Metric" of "Cloud Tag" to the dashboard, the custom plugin starts to autoRefresh as expected.

I see that not all of Kibana default plugins work with the dashboard autoRefresh, for example the Markdown plugin autoRefreshes in the editor but not when added to a dashboard.

Besides calling the handler.done after the custom plugin is rendered, is there anything additional I need to implement in the custom plugin to make it work with the autoRefresh of the dashboards?

[Mikhail_Shustov]

@dmprieto

autoRefresh

Your plugin needs to re-fetch data manually. It can learn when it's time to fetch data with Autorefresh API

[dmprieto]

I was able to include the autoRefreshFetch code in my plugin and still the auto refresh loop only executed once when the plugin is inside a dashboard.

I debugged the code and in auto_refresh_loop.ts I saw that the following condition never happened, so the counter didn’t restart

if (pendingDoneCount === 0) {

start();

}

In the end I found out that the issue is happening in this file https://github.com/elastic/kibana/blob/7.17/src/plugins/dashboard/public/application/lib/sync_dashboard_filter_state.ts , in this section of the code:

// best way in a dashboard to estimate that panels are updated is to rely in search session service state waitUntilNextSessionCompletes$(search.session).pipe(finalize(done))

The session needs to be marked as complete, and after that the auto_refresh_loop done method is called. I found out that in the timeline plugin they are calling trackSession and untrackSession and this triggers changing the session state to complete, see kibana/timelion_request_handler.ts at 7.17 · elastic/kibana · GitHub

After calling those methods in my code the auto refresh worked and I didn’t have to call the autoRefresh API. The way that Kibana handles the dashboard session was affecting the autoRefresh logic, not sure if this only happens in Kibana 7.17.0