Notify users of available update

Product Suggestions
1

We have noticed that with a lot of our applications many of our users have a habit of leaving their apps running while not in use, and as a result are not getting the most up to date version of the app. Ideally I would like an option when I publish a new version to automatically restart everyone’s app so that they can be updated, but even just pushing a notification to the user that they should update would be super helpful.

2

Hey Kyle,

At this time there is no great way of doing this natively in the platform, but thankfully, because Tulip is so flexible I have found a pretty powerful solution:

  1. Create a table called Latest App Versions with two columns, ID and Version Number (integer). The ID of records in this column will be the App Name you are manually controlling.
  2. In an app where you are trying to auto-update, load this record On App Enter based on App Info → App Name.
  3. On a timer trigger (maybe every 60 seconds), check to see if the App Info → App Version is less than the Version Number in that table. If the version number is out of date, you can use triggers to do anything to control a dynamic response. You could auto restart, show a message, or email a manager… whatever. The power is in the flexibility here.
  4. The downside-- whenever a new version of an app is published, the publisher will need to manually update this table to match the new version number. Otherwise the action in 3^ will never know to fire.

Let me know if that makes sense. Hopefully this helps you guys come up with a custom solution which works for your shop floor!

1 Like
3

Hey Dan,

Appreciate the suggestion. This was actually an idea we had considered here, but we had shied away from it due to the work required to get it up and running on all of the apps we currently have released on the floor. We’ll revisit the idea though and perhaps we can implement it on a smaller scale first.

4

Has there been any traction on this idea to force update a station to the latest version?

5

This thread / feature request is similar to this thread: Scheduled Update Push

I posted my workaround to this problem in that thread