Manual:Administration:Displays

Overview
Displays are how you output your layouts with Xibo.

Each client application registered with the server creates a new display in the Xibo server. You can then choose a default layout for that display, schedule further layouts on the display and control who has access to the display, as well as monitor its status from the Display Management page.

Client Media Inventory
When you schedule new content, or change existing content, it's helpful to know that the displays have updated with the new information. From version 1.2.2 of the Xibo server and client, the client applications will connect to the server periodically and update it on the media items that they have stored locally. This allows you to look at a glance to check if your updates were pulled by the clients yet.

On the display management page, you'll see a column "Status". The status light can be either green, amber or red.

When you make a change that affects the output of the server to a given client (for example if you modify a layout scheduled on that client, schedule a new layout or change the default layout), the status light will immediately go red. That signifies that as far as the server is aware there are updates pending for that client and it has not received them yet.

The client will then connect to the server on a schedule and will read the new information that's available. If there are new files to download (for example if you modified a layout or scheduled something completely new), the status light will turn amber while the files are downloaded.

Once the client is satisfied that all files have been downloaded, it will send an inventory of all the files it has active in it's cache back to the server, and the server will change the status light to green.

If you're curious to see what files the client is actively monitoring, you can click the "Media Inventory" button and a popup will appear showing the status of each file, along with the last time the client checked it was still stored correctly on disk. You'll also see any files that the client is in the process of downloading. (Note here that what you will not see is files that the client needs to download, but that it is unaware of at the present time. For example. If you schedule a new layout and immediately go to the Media Inventory before the client has connected up to the server, you'll see the status light is red, but the content of the media inventory will not show the new files that are required. Once the client connects, those new files will be included in the inventory automatically.)