Stats: Display time stamp for reports

[timmyc]

From feedback:

Aside: If other stats pages aren’t going to live update, we really need some way to show when it was “generated” and have a refresh link, especially for the desktop app where there is no “refresh”.

Perhaps we could have a new component that would be shown on stats pages that simply displays time ago in words of when the report data was last updated. Inside that component, also have a link for triggering a refresh.

/cc @jancavan @alternatekev

[apeatling]

+1

[jancavan]

We could create a "Last updated" component - probably should just be devoid of lots of custom styling so they can easily be added to other already existing components like a card, etc.

[timmyc]

So you think having it on a per component/card basis - Or also have it where it could be stand-alone for an entire page?

[jancavan]

No, not a per component basis but yes, stand-alone. What are your thoughts?

[jancavan]

Btw, displaying time ago would be nice, but I don't think I like the idea of adding a refresh link. The page should just refresh itself and we display when it was last updated. /cc @jblz

[jblz]

The page should just refresh itself

👍 I think we should requery the data & show updated values when a user becomes active after some period of inactivity & periodically while they are active (once a minute, tops).

The data-poller library might be useful here as I think it handles the user-activity bit above.

and we display when it was last updated

My expectation as a user is for numbers that represent the "current" ("instantaneous" in the physics sense of the word) view to always be as up-to-date as is technically possible for the service.

The more I think about it, the less useful I think displaying a timestamp or "time ago" for our stats reporting is -- except for a "print" view (which is necessarily a snapshot of stats at the moment in time it was rendered).

stand-alone for an entire page

One challenge here is we have a dozen or so endpoints whose return values comprise various "reports":

• day, week, month, year summary pages
• insights
• post summary
• etc.

Our endpoints take various amounts of time to complete, so it's not exactly correct to bump an overall timestamp each time an endpoint returns and call it representative of all the underlying data.

I think the best approach here is to just show the latest data as they come in and indicate in a comprehensive fashion when the report might be stale. There is a lot of work going on at the moment to make Calypso usable while offline and I think some visual cue could work.

Related: #2333

[jblz]

Related: #2966

[stale]

This issue has been marked as stale because it hasn't been updated in a while. It will be closed in a week. If you would like it to remain open, can you please comment below and see what you can do to get things moving with this issue? Thanks! 🙏

[jancavan]

"Last update" has been added and page auto-refreshes so closing this issue.